Mr. Bullock’s job is to raise the flag in Schulenburg Junior High School at eight o’clock every single morning. The flag stand is located at the north side of the campus, next to the sycamore tree. Every morning, about ten minutes before the bell clock strikes at eight, Mr. Bullock takes the folded flag in a leatherette rain cover out of his locker. Before he closes the locker, he combs his sparse hair all to the back in front of the mirror, which is attached on the inner side of the locker. He always combs his hair attentively, even though he has done so before he left home. He opens the top right drawer in his wooden desk, takes his white clean gloves, and put them in his pocket of his pants before walking out. His working room is no more than sixteen square feet. He calls this kind of small space handleable. He can reach everything without moving any step. Just as he does every morning, opening the locker on the right hand side of the room and turning around to take the gloves in the desk on his way out.

His room is on the south side of the campus. Even though there are two-hundred feet between his room and the flag stand, it takes him four and half minutes walking. Mr. Bullock is a stout man with a full beard. His belly has grown bigger compared to himself in the photo taken by his wife twenty years ago while he was raising the flag and now lying on his desk under the plastic mat. His steps are still brisk. On his fiftieth birthday last year, he received a little statue of a man raising a flag from the principal of the school. Students like to come to his working room. Not only can they borrow any kind of tool from him, but they also like to see those medals hanging on the walls and listen to Mr. Bullock speak each of its story.

Mr. Bullock usually arrives at the flag stand four minutes before eight. He takes the pair of his gloves out of his pocket and put them on. Then he takes the flag out of the cover, unfolds the flag, and flattens the flag with a sudden shake from one side. He pulls the clips on the rope attached to the flagpole and hooks each of them on two corners of the flag. In order to avoid the flag touching the ground, Mr. Bullock has to raise the flag higher than his shoulders while attaching it to the pole.

At eight o’clock, national anthem broadcasts from the stereo room. Everyone stops what he is doing and faces toward the direction of the flag in a standing position. Mr. Bullock pulls the rope down slowly, and stops when the anthem ends. At this moment, the flag reaches at the top of the pole.