“Write When You Find Work”
Young Orlo loved his family, but as one of thirteen children growing up in a squalid two-room dirt shack, he needed to leave. Now.
So once he was finally 12 years old and thus a fully grown man, he left a note for his parents that he was going to stop being such a ceaseless burden and head West to look for a better life. He snuck out before the sunrise with nothing but a hat he found on a dead hobo in a ditch, the clothes his mother stitched him, and his favourite stick and bindle.
He promised to write when he found work… he was going to make them proud.
As he had decided to do ever since he was a youthful and romantic 11 and a half, he hopped onto the first rusty freight train he saw and planned to ride the rails past the cornfields, past the deserts, all the way to the seemingly mythical Pacific Ocean.
Unfortunately, since the railroads didn’t take kindly to stowaways, he was routinely thrown off the train and beaten to a pulp, but Orlo didn’t let this stop him. It just slowed him down a bit.
In each town along the way he struggled to find work, and took whatever odd job he could find. Corn scrudger, spittoon licker, hay de-pile-up-er, race riot instigator, swallowing wasps for the amusement of wealthy land barons– it was all the same junk he could find back home. Barely able to even pay for fresh moldy dirt for dinner, he’d stay awake each night wondering why he ever left.
Orlo missed his family sumthin’ fierce, and wished more than anything he could know how they were doing… but he couldn’t dare write them yet, not with the nothing he’s accomplished. He simply didn’t deserve to, it’d break their hearts to know he was such a disappointment, and he’d rather die than do that to Ma and Pa and his 7 sisters and 5 brothers and whatever new siblings his parents had made during the time Orlo was away.
Inching his way West, Orlo sadly realizes that everywhere he went it was all the same. He denied that revelation to himself for a few years though, ever hoping but ever failing, with only menial labour and indentured servitude available to a boy of his ruddiness and phrenological cranio-bumpage.
Luckily though, The Great War began for reasons he was never quite sure about (but assumed they knew what they were doing), and Orlo decided to lie about his age so he could go serve and fight. “At last!”, he thought, “a chance to do something worthy”, as surely becoming a war hero would earn him the right to write home. It wasn’t “work” specifically, but it was close enough.
Soon after he survived his first encounter with trench warfare with only minor gunshot wounds that nevertheless caused the amputation of his left leg, Orlo finally felt accomplished enough to write home from the hospital room.
He heard back 3 years later. Turns out everyone is fine.
(Starring my Dad’s Dad cuz it’s my Dad’s birthday!)
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