MMy father used to express his hopes for me while passing through the doorway between his small store in front and our apartment in the rear. He’d talk to my mother as though I wasn’t standing right there. ‘He’s artistic,’ he’d say. ‘He could become a sign-painter. People always need signs. Pays good money. Tough union to crack, though.’

Then, a week or so later: ‘Meat-cutter. People’re always going to eat meat, for heaven’s sake. Steady work, and he’ll make good money if he can get into the union.’

Later still: ‘I was talking to Hansen, the plumber. Tells me there’s lots of work around. He’d be willing to start him as a helper. If it works out, he’ll help him get a union card. Plumbing, it’s steady.’

These, and half a dozen other careers, were his great expectations for me. It was the early fifties; I was twelve or thirteen.

My father was a small, disappointed man who ran a foundering candy store in Brooklyn. He worked twelve to fourteen hours each day, seven days a week, barely keeping his family above the low tide of subsistence. Naturally, he wanted a better life for me: to him, that meant job security, ‘good’ money and a forty-hour week. In other words, a union job. In our neighbourhood, an entire generation of hard-working fathers wanted the same thing for their sons.

became an English professor, and by the late 1970s was teaching at a small liberal arts college. One year my colleagues and I became unhappy with our salary and conditions, and I found myself on a committee organized to address the problems. The committee’s first task was to draft a statement defining a professor’s function–words like ‘educator’, ‘facilitator’ and ‘pedagogue’ were debated for hours. When I suggested that since we performed tasks for a salary, we really ought to consider ourselves ‘workers’. It was as though I’d farted.

The group that was finally formed to represent the professors called itself an ‘Association’. Because it refused to call itself a union, it could never really be a union. Such snobbery also drove away the non-teaching college staff–secretaries and plant workers mostly–who joined a Teamsters’ local.

My heart was never really in my ‘Association’, even though I was required to pay dues and have it represent me. And then one year, 1976, the Association agreed to work without a contract. I argued at one meeting that a strike, or at least the threat of one, was the only leverage an organized workforce had. (My father would have been proud of me.) I was outvoted and told that I didn’t understand the subtleties of negotiations in academia.

here are no more May Days. My daughter is grown and in college; we still laugh occasionally about the teacher protest in Gap. But she’s not a union person and probably never will be. Most one-room schoolhouses in France have been closed.

This brave new NAFTA-esque, GATT-arian world doesn’t seem like the proper place to write longingly about labour unions. But that’s why I’ve done it. Intellectual or not, I am my father’s son and my daughter’s father, still a believer in causes; as a misplaced, misbegotten union man, my causes are mostly lost.

I came upon my old what is my salary? sandwich-board in the attic recently. The romantic in me welled instantly, and I imagined a father–an Asian, a Latino, an Eastern European father, someone who wished for his son or daughter ‘good’ money, job security, a forty-hour week. I conjured up many such fathers. And millions of their children.

She saw no significance in the memory other than it had displaced this actual day of her life and the disturbance her observations of Tommy McHugh had caused. Her life with her father and mother had passed. Her life with her husband had now passed. Was her whole life, then, all nothing? Was it just what happened and the memory of those happenings, like the old classmate she had once chanced upon in the ship’s restaurant during a Holyhead-Dublin crossing? The classmate had grown old, was only dimly recognizable, as she herself had grown old, having to be asked if, indeed, she was the girl at Earlsfort Terrace who played hockey and married one of the medical students. The memory of her father, though, had not grown old, had come to her out of all those dead years with more freshness and vividness than the actual sea thistle and heather between the rocks at her feet high above the pounding ocean. It could not all be nothing. ‘A mind lively and at ease with itself is content to look at nothing,’ she recalled a favourite passage from Jane Austen, ‘and that nothing will always answer back;’ and suddenly the recollection itself gave heart and belief to her walk. That was what always answered back, all that we had loved, all that we had cared for. Love is never tired or dispirited. Love is ever watchful and lively and at ease.