Dignified Doorman Poem by Jan Oskar Hansen

The Dignified Doorman

In the thirties when fish factories in my town closed, the sardines
didn’t swim near shore, they swam further into deep the ocean.
Perhaps collective memory told them not to go near the coastline.
Like the war, it was forgotten when old sardines died out and the new
generation swam too close to shore again, but that was after my
two uncles had gone to America to find work. In New York one of
them, a young man with an immense dignity got a temporary job
as a doorman at a swanky hotel, but he stayed the uniform was
smart and the ladies were very kind to him, free food and lodging.

After twenty years, he came back home and bought a house, cash,
of tips given to him by hotel’s clients and he got married which was
expected of a man with greying hair and a fairly new bungalow.
In the meantime, there had been a war and he got a job as a driver
for the boss of a brewery a job he kept till he retired. A placid man,
more than Domingo, his wife had affairs in the hope of shaking him
out of his placidity he turned the other cheek. Talking about cheeks
when his wife died he moved in with his friend and both of them
lived to be old men, who had found love, if a bit late in life.