It’s been a busy week for me, and I really didn’t have the time to obsessively record the data and impressions from my training rides, and to be honest, the log will be ending next week (as racing season is starting) and I’m running on fumes when it comes to writing about riding my bike. I am substituting a story I wrote for another venue that never saw the light of day, enjoy.

Like my pre-dawn preparations for my bike races, my father’s hobbies during my formative years involved early morning wake up calls. He was an avid duck hunter during my childhood, and for reasons unknown to my pre-teenaged mind, the best time to put ducks on the path to waterfowl Valhalla was at dawn. On the days we served as death’s alarm clock for the duckies, dad would slip quietly into the room I shared with my two brothers to gently shake me and say, "Dan, time to get up." This was done very quietly, in order to not wake my brothers. Of course, nothing short of a helicopter landing on the blue shag carpeting of our bedroom would’ve woken my two brothers—but dad was getting ready to hunt, and perhaps saw entering our room unnoticed as a challenge to his stalking skills. When he shook me, I would awake abruptly, and my nose would fill with the unmistakeably sour scent of coffee and a morning cigarette—a sure signal that dad was close. I would take a moment to bid farewell to my warm bed, and then hold my breath and rise through the foul cloud to find my long johns and wool socks that were waiting patiently at the end of my bed.  

Physically, I am a near perfect replica of my father. We both have eyes, inherited from my father’s mother, that have a puppy-like droop on the outside edges that give our faces a begging expression, as if we’re perpetually about to ask permission to leave the classroom to go to the restroom. His brown hair is curlier than mine, and my hairline favors that of my mother’s father as it slowly creeps backwards towards my neck. He has a mustache, which he grew in order to not have to field questions about being my mother’s younger brother when they were first married. We both have blue eyes and are of moderate height, and we have the same rubbery button noses, which can be pushed with a finger to lay almost flat against our faces—and that also makes them very tempting targets for punches.

My dad owned a three employee precast concrete company in Dubuque, Iowa that was attached to the back door of our house—as we enjoyed living in one of the few combination heavy industrial/residential zones in the United States. And when I say attached, I mean the "shop" (as it was known), was literally attached to our home. A fifty foot walk from his recliner separated my dad’s leisure life from his livelihood. The long hallway that ran through the center of the first floor of our house ended at a heavy wooden door that served as the portal to the dusty, noisy and backbreaking world of concrete manufacturing.

My father took over the business when his mother died, inheriting an enterprise teetering on the brink of disaster. My grandmother had assumed control of the company after her husband had died, and she wasn’t necessarily built for the stewardship of a manufacturing concern. Under her leadership, the shop concentrated on producing yard ornaments (bird baths, planters and urns for flowers) and burial vaults that cemeteries placed caskets into. It was a business plan based on death and lawn trinkets.
Unlike delivering concrete with large mixer trucks, precasting concrete is done in a plant and delivered finished. The concrete is poured into sturdy metal forms, where it cures and when the forms are removed, you get an urn, bird bath or vault to toss a coffin into. The routine required to produce completed pieces of formed concrete is relentless, like tending a herd of dairy cattle with their daily milking requirements or keeping a starlet’s latte perfectly frothy throughout a day’s worth of shooting at the beach. It’s an anxiety producing grind, and if you cannot maintain the regimen of pouring, curing and removing the finished concrete bounty—you will go broke very quickly.

I can understand why my father chose to relax by blasting ducks out of the misty morning air. Facing the sisyphean schedule of his backyard mud works (my dad many times referred to working in concrete as "playing in the mud") had to take its toll psychologically, and to some there’s something primally satisfying about a shotgun’s explosion and the puff of feathers, blood and bone that form before a duck falls lifelessly out of the sky.

As a developing young fellow, I wasn’t entranced by predatory bloodlust, but I was intrigued by the manly proceedings that justified such an early start (plus, being allowed to legally discharge weapons out of doors is a notion that’s irresistible to the twelve year old mindset). Simply put, I was dying to find out what my dad was doing at such an ungodly hour, and if some ducks had to perish in the process, then so be it.