Shell

The year was 1969, and I had just returned from Mexico. My high school choir always scheduled its annual tour a day or two after graduation. It was a disappointment for me that year, because the previous year we had gone to Hawaii, and Mexico was no match for the exotic lands of King Kamehameha.
One night of rest later, my dad and I were off to Houston to work. The job was Two Shell Plaza in downtown Houston; a 35-story building, twin to its sister skyscraper, One Shell Plaza. Shell was going to move its international headquarters to the buildings in two years, but in the meantime we needed to wrap the outside with slabs of marble.
The suspended scaffold was already several stories up (maybe 10?) and frightfully high to me. I was never comfortable with heights, and in this environment there was little between me and the ground but a long drop. Each square of scaffold support had a hand-operated crank that wound up the twisted cable suspended from pikes somewhere above. There were boards across the supports to make it wrap completely around the building, but it still bounced  with the slightest movement. I didn't like it.
I can almost remember my first time stepping out the hole that would become a window and onto the creaky boards in the humid, gusty air. I don't know how long it took, but eventually I was able to mix a bowl of plaster in the building, sprint to the window, and land on the boards in a trot, hustling to get the plaster to the waiting slab before it started to harden.
We lived in a boarding house while working on that job, not as friendly as the boarding house where we stayed in Atlanta the previous summer. I remember noticing the diesel odor on the street when we arrived there, and I remember the next morning when I was amazed at the difference in the air. There was a bus driver strike, and all the buses were off the roads that day. What a difference!
This all came back to me today when I heard the news that Shell was moving its headquarters out of downtown and over to the west side of Houston. It hit me as a tick on my personal clock, showing how things change as time continues to pass. I don't know how I feel about it. I don't have any real connection to Shell except this one event, but it somehow feels profound.