Old Immigrants

My father will be 59 this fall. He’s been working the fields of the central California coast for 40 years. He lost his job last year, and has been collecting unemployment for a number of months. If anyone deserves unemployment “benefits” it’s him, so I never asked him about looking for work or encouraged him to do so. I figured that a guy who’s worked 7 days a week, every week, of every month, of every year for the past 39 years, deserves to rest, at least before regretting never having enjoyed life in America at least one year. But his unemployment is running out. This, together with the fact that he’s driving my mother absolutely bonkers, motivated him to ask his old boss for a job—a guy who swore he would get my father work whenever he wanted it and who just happens to have a new crew working the fields in King City. His old boss, a devout Christian who doesn’t miss an opportunity to preach charity and good will and the magic of Jesus, didn’t hesitate to tell my father that he was too old to work, that if he were 15 years younger, then he might be exploitable, but not at 59! My father said fine, and resigned himself to despair and the memories of a different sort of discrimination. I called him and told him that we should get a lawyer and sue their asses for age-discrimination. What for, he said, they’ll deny it and say that they just don’t need men right now. Would a Christian lie? I asked. Surely, if questioned about his reasons for not hiring you, someone who believes in the Resurrection would tell the truth. My father, who usually doesn’t say much, didn’t say much. “Umm,” he said, “I’ll go ask Rusty if he has work for me.” Rusty is a guy he worked for when we lived in the Gashouse…I have my doubts about my father’s future in the business. Old immigrants are expendable.