The Bell - Writing Lesson

     I was off in La - La land when the bell rang.  No not the recess bell in school, although that's where I may have been, mindfully anyway.  The bell rings at dusk at the factory where I work.  Finally time to go home.  Long steady days or nights on the belt can turn your thoughts into dreams.  You are standing there sorting one never ending variety of fruit rolling past in groups spread accross the eighteen inch or two foot wide belt, while your eyes move up and down and back and forth rapidly trying not to miss any rotten or bad fruit.  You must grab the rotten or bad fruit and get it off the belt before it passes you and goes into the stew pot for canning.  Towards the end of the day you can litterally go into an out of body state of mind and be flying around somewhere in your thoughts when the bell rings for a break or to go home.  You take a slow step back as you are in a daze before moving on down off the the platform for fear of falling flat on your noggin and never comming out of La-La land.  At four hour intervals, later changed to two hour and fifteen minute intervals before stopping it's a walk in the park compared to how long the women had to work during the era of WWII.  They worked up to 16 hour days with pay of about one dollar and twenty cents a week so we have come a really long way.

Note: This writing lesson, (but not the contents) was taken from the book, "The Write Brain", "the bell rings", by Bonnie Neubauer.