Two years ago, the summer that he turned seventy, my father worked for his younger brother’s thriving contracting company. Week after sweltering week, Dad tore down ceiling tile, crushed ductwork, and carried heavy industrial air conditioners and other HVAC equipment out of an old school. The building itself was basically a brick oven, and the other laborers were less than half his age. After retiring early from the postal service, my father spent his sixties helping raise his grandkids and pursuing his dream of becoming a Catholic deacon. But that summer, tight finances and the lure of quick cash spoke louder to him than the strain on his joints.
By July, my sisters and I were scheming on how to compel him to quit. When confronted with any of our concerns, Dad responded with his usual refrain, the same thing he’d said when he worked construction in our childhood: “You forget, girls, I’m Superman.”
At a time when thousands of baby boomers are returning to work to make ends meet, Karla Murthy’s new documentary, The Gas Station Attendant, is bound to resonate. It is a powerful film that both honors a complicated patriarch and exposes the fallibility — and fallout — of his American dream. Murthy’s father, H. N. Shantha, would seem to be the poster child for the virtues of extreme bootstrapping: he escaped a life of indigence in India, earned a college degree in the United States, joined the professional-managerial class as an engineer, and provided for a boisterous brood in suburban Houston.
