After 3 years of shepherding in Hawkes Bay NZ
The Shepherd.
Zephyrs softly blowing,
Seeds of truth are sowing.
From the hilly ridges
Across the natural bridges,
On the back blocks, through the valleys,
Down the pastures, to the rivers.
I can see them down below me.
A white horse that cannot know me,
And I smile as I go floating, silent by.
But I see the nose that quivers,
Big brown eyes that make me shiver
And I let him settle, slowly on my mind.
As I look across the hills that I can see,
I feel a wet and coldness by my knee
And my dog is quietly walking,
We’ve no need for idle talking.
I’ll always feel his spirit close to me,
As we go down beside the rolling sea.
The Accident!
The ship travelling home to New Zealand in 1965 had been a fun four weeks but after we arrived in Auckland it was important that I get a job until we decided just where we wanted to live and what our plans for the future were. After a couple of days staying with my mom and dad in their Titirangi home I applied for and got a job at the Fisher & Paykel factory that made white ware including fridges and freezers.
I found myself being part of a production line whose job was assembling a fridge with a small freezer at the top. My particular part of the operation was to install the freezer compartment and fix two screws in place. After about two hours I began to find this basically simple activity exceedingly boring and was looking for ways to make it more interesting. Each hour I timed myself and counted how many freezers I had installed. The first hour was about 12 units but by mid afternoon I was up to over 30 and at this point a nice union representative whispered quietly “Don’t go too fast - we don’t want to threaten our overtime do we”.
At the end of the production line , just across from where I was working, two women were charged with wiping down the fridges to remove finger and other marks that might have been received as the rest of us installed the components including polyurethane foam which was the insulator around the body of the fridge and freezer. The polyurethane was administered through some holes in the back of the cabinet as a liquid which foamed and filled every crevice. This always resulted in some spillage through joints and holes in the assembly which needed , for aesthetic reasons, to be completely removed and this was the task of the two quality control women, who used a range of solvents and cloths. On our breaks I often walked past the bench where they worked and the smell of volatile solvents had always been very evident. So I was very concerned to see them smoking as they worked but assumed that they knew what they were doing and perhaps I was being alarmist.
I had only been at the factory about a week when I glanced across the production line to see one of the women reach into her pocket for a lighter for the cigarette in her mouth. The flash turned into a ball of fire which engulfed the table in front of the woman with the cigarette and her co-worker fell over in fright. There did not seem to be any plan for such an event as nobody moved so I leapt for the fire extinguisher on the wall, and quickly covered her in foam. Luckily the fire seemed to be contained within a metal tray in front of her and it was entirely extinguished. Several fellow workers rushed with me over to the woman on the floor as her cigarette smoking colleague proceeded to hurl abuse at whoever had covered her in foam, ruined her uniform and wrecked her make up!
It was a crowded bridge in Istanbul. There was some kind of fishing competition going on as I ambled over the bridge watching everyone point their rods over the edge. I stopped and watched as a young boy hoisted a tiny fish from the waters of the Bosphorus about 50 feet below him and put it in a small bucket of water.
I peered into his bucket to look at the fish as he smiled at me. I smiled back at him , pointed down at the water below and held my palms apart. He grinned again and held his arms out as far as they would go, palms facing and laughed. I backed off a couple of paces and held my palm up and quick as a wink he held his up, indicating a fish about 8 feet long! We laughed together. Neither spoke a word of the others language but we had communicated , we were at one and we both knew it and enjoyed it!
