Michael Estabrook thinks of himself as a businessman, lives in
Acton, MA, and can be reached at mestabr815@aol.com.



Blue Collar New Year's

At midnight Mom and Dad,
Kerry, Todd, and our neighbors
all up and down
the block came out
of their warm homes
banging pots and pans
with wooden spoons,
or simply slapped
the pots and pans together
like cymbals. This
is how we brought in
the New Year
on Northfield Avenue.
I was too young to know
if Dad was drunk during this
boisterous festival of
high jinks and merrymaking,
but I'm certain it
would've helped.


Mother died too young

her eyes shimmering
brown otters
swimming around
around in pools of sand.


my Grandfather haunts me

there he is
squatted down on his
haunches,
smoking cigarette
between his fingers,
dripping ashes.
that serene smile.
his brown leather loafers
falling apart,
his paint bespattered pants.
he's taking a
rest from putting
the new linoleum down
over the
old linoleum on the
bungalow kitchen floor.
"why don't you take
Guy for a walk
in the field over yonder,"
he motions with his hand.
"just be careful
not to step
on the glass from broken
bottles, and
the rusty nails."


Tuesday morning about 8:20

Dave's getting some iguanas to keep in his
apartment at college (I told him they
were cheaper than having girls in
his apartment). Laura's joining
a sorority, that's another
$700, but what the hell whatever
it'll take to help her adjust.
Robin's been rather cranky, but 14
year old girls need time to
find themselves, Patti keeps
telling me. And Patti's planning a
Thelma and Louise trip out to Detroit
to link-up with Linda, her best friend
from high school, so I
have to worry about her coming
home and letting me know that after 25
years, finally, she sees me for
the complete asshole I really am.
I'd like to become a Marine
Biologist but with 2 kids in college
I can't afford it. My back is killing me.
After 25 years
my father-in-law still
hasn't accepted me as part of his family.
At work I'm on this Sales Compensation
Planning Team, spending
countless hours sitting around in
a windowless room talking
and talking. And all the while I'm
asking myself why in the hell I didn't
enroll in that stupid Ph.D.
program in Comp Lit at
the University of Connecticut 2 years ago,
I'd almost be out by now.


Ulysses S. Grant never said -

"Hey babe let's tango."
"What! No cream cheese!"
"Paris is just so lovely in the springtime,
don't you agree?"
"Would you like a stick of chewing gum?"
"Did anyone thing to water the poinsettias?"
"Oogy, woogy, boogy, ha!"
"Damn I broke another nail."
"My fucking horse crapped on my shoe."
"Oh yes, man will fly someday."
"Please pass the catsup."
"Crockery, crockery, crokery's
just fine, if I weren't the President
I'd collect crockery
all the time."






Laura just got her driver's license

and she's driving
the family station wagon
with her boyfriend, Steve,
and she totals it into the car
in front of her.
"Are you all right?" I ask.
"Is everyone all right?"
And when I come home
that night I bring her
a dozen roses to soften the pain,
I suppose, but I bet she'll
never remember that part.






you shouldn't deny your dreams
(for Renee)

My niece asks me
to interpret her dream,
a colorful rapidly moving montage -
she's a stranger in a strange place,
(of course), late for class,
3 other mean
girls grabbing at her wanting
to hurt her, but she fights
them off, and wakes-up. So I take
this propitious opportunity
to tell her hers
is a strong personality, she's sure
of herself even after such
a tumultuous upbringing,
and I'm proud of her, so glad to see
her strength. But perhaps
she's denying her sensitive artistic
side, perhaps she ought to stop
and rethink the merely ordinary path
she's chosen for herself.
"You might be selling yourself
short." "Yes," she says, nodding,
her eyes twinkling, "I see
what you're saying." And I think,
yes perhaps so, but now
the real work begins.







in the dirt on the floor beneath the fuse box


I look underneath the bench,
behind trash barrels, in all the
dark corners, finding it
finally, its edges gnawed, I
imagine rather frantically, a
solitary mouse tail lying
alongside. The same
afternoon one of those typical
priggish University Magazine
rejection slips comes in
the mail with something scrawled
contemptuously across it by
another anonymous professional
poet or literary critic: "I'm
sorry to say that I simply don't
get much of what you're doing.
I'm sure it's some lapse in my
reading prowess.
I begin thinking
in earnest again about what
to do with the rest of my life.





actually got to take a long bike ride with the Divisional VP


He's my boss's boss,
and his entire division is out
at this fancy place called
Mountain Shadows Resort and Golf Club
in Scottsdale, Arizona,
for a national sales meeting.
It's our free afternoon, and I round
the corner of the bike rental shop and
there he is. "What's the matter, Mike,
not playing golf with everybody else?"
"Nope," I shake my head,
"Never have gotten into golf."
"Care to join me on a bike ride?"
So I say yes, of course, and we ride
for 2 hours over these wonderful winding
scenic bike paths, and even though
my ass is hurting like
hell by the time we've finished,
I had a fine time. Gerald is French
so I got to talk about all my favorite
French things: the Louvre,
Monet's Gardens at Giverny, Chartres
Cathedral and Notre Dame, Moliere,
Racine, Victor Hugo, Rodin, Renoir,
Cezanne, Gauguin and Degas,
Abelard and Heloise, St. Bernard
of Clairvaux and the Cistercian Monks,
Pascal's Penses, Descartes' Methodes,
Montesquieu, Rabelais, Voltaire, the
Arthurian Romances of Chretien de Troyes,
the Maxims of Le Duc de La Rochefoucauld,
Le Grand Meaulnes (my very favorite
novel), and the great Provencal
Troubadours: Arnaut Daniel,
Raimbaut of Orange, Bertran de Born,
Bernart de Ventadorn . . .
Of course, Gerald is a businessman
so he knows virtually nothing
of these matters, but it was fun
watching the quizzical looks playing
off his face and hearing his
thick French accent. When I
get home and tell my wife all about
my fine time in the sun with Gerald, she
shakes her head and laughs, "Only you
would blow a perfect opportunity
to impress the big boss by talking
about something stupid like Provencal
Poetry and Monasticism."





When I was 17

you couldn't have
convinced me that 30 years
from then I'd be raking leaves
in my front yard
and enjoying it, stopping
only long enough to talk
with the old guy who walks his
cocker spaniel
by my house about
how our dogs are getting old.






progress is computers and crab Legs


Another computer training session
learning to do tasks better, faster,
more efficiently, than I
could do them before, tasks,
actually, that I never did
before, never even thought
of doing before, or knew
I could do or wanted to do before.
And everybody's sitting around
the conference room table staring
through their thick
lensed glasses at
their little laptop computer
screens, fingers clicking
frantically across tiny keypads
sounding like
an army of crabs scurrying, their
tiny little crab legs skittering
across a bare wooden floor.







Sometimes people aren't what they seem to be at first.

I'm riding with Jim K., my new sales rep in upstate New York, over to meet with Larry, senior purchasing agent at the Baush and Lomb Company in Rochester.

We have to take him out to lunch, Jim says. I always take him out to a lunch. He gives me valuable information.

OK, I shrug. But I'm not in the mood for entertaining today. And over the years I've found that wining and dining purchasing agents is a particularly big waste of time. This isn't the case in many industries, but for us, the process engineers and validation technicians specify our products, not the damn purchasing agents. All they do is phone-in the orders and try to beast our prices down. I've found them to be, as a group, either lugubriously boring and tedious people, or up and all smiles and chatteringly chipper like some damn demented squirrels. Generally speaking, they're simply not a very bright lot.

And Larry, the B&L senior purchaser, is no exception. He's short and slow-moving and stocky with close-cropped hair and thick-lensed glasses. Over lunch he swills down two vodkas on the rocks and three red wines, which is a lot when you've got to go back to work, but, hey, that's his business not mine.

What really gets to me is his habit of repeating himself over and over again. And he doesn't say anything useful or of interest whatsoever. Where, I wonder, is all this "valuable information" that Jim spoke of? But what makes the whole thing almost unbearable is that he speaks in a very soft inaudible monotone, his thoughts so disconnected and confused that I find him impossible to follow. It's simply boring, mindless gibberish. He's droning and drinking, drinking and droning, on and on and on.

What is this guy talking about? Why am I here? What the hell is he doing in a job like this? He should be an operator on one of the bottling lines over at Genesee Brewery, or delivering packages for UPS. I rapidly lose my patience with his disoriented mutterings. This is quite plainly a waste of time. I'm annoyed with Jim, too, for getting us into this stupid situation. I want to get it over with and get back to work. There is work to be done, you know, I'm glaring at Jim. Jesus, this is like being at the dentist.

Then Larry, for no particular reason I can determine, blurts out that his birthday is Saturday, he's turning 44. I notice his college ring, 1970, the same year I graduated college. But I'm only 42. Suddenly the light goes on in my thick foolish head. I understand his seemingly mindless meanderings.

"So Larry," I say, "You've been to Vietnam."

Jim's mouth drops open. "How could you possibly know that?"

But Larry peers quietly over his thick glasses at me for a long time. He smiles, then rubs his wrinkled forehead hard and says, "I was in the Iron Triangle in the winter of '66."

I order another drink for him, and for myself too.









I'm moving into my new office though it's not as easy as one might think

I don't really have an
office, waiting for Bob to move out
so I can move in, but I need to get my
furniture ordered, and a phone
installed, and a new phone
number and voice mail number.
And a computer too, the one I have now
is a "field remote" computer so
I need to turn it back
into the Sales Department,
then order a LAN-based configured
model with a docking station
mount design (or something like that).
To do this I need to go over to
Roberta in the Purchasing
Department, but I don't know who
Roberta is or where her department is,
and Judy, my new secretary, besides
being really creepy looking with
a shitty chip-on-her-shoulder attitude,
knows even less than
I do about any of these office
logistics, so I have to rely on
Kathy who is
my boss's secretary (Executive
Administrative Assistant actually),
and who is really uncomfortable
dealing with people on
my lowly level. Guess I'll just sit
here then, writing poems.

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