Sep

25

The summer after freshman year in college a friend's father hired me for construction work, following a good showing pick-axing his manicured hillside for railroad-tie steps. Tony owned a successful contracting firm, and there was always a need for strong backs on the job.

The promised pay was good - more than double minimum wage. Each morning we would arrive by 7am for a full eight hours of pick and shovel with hard-hat, under the blazing San Fernando Valley sun. At 10 there was a break, heralded by the barrio horn of a catering truck. Orange juice! Soda! Sweet rolls, coffee! Anything please! Twenty minutes you could sit down and whatever he had, it was so good and warm or cold and almost the sweat would start to dry when it was time to go back again and swing that heavy tool.

A laborer; shoveling and cleaning up concrete debris, wood, sand, and mud around the foundations of recent block masonry, and trenches of proscribed depth destined for footings of a new building of industry. Every day. Hot. Dry. Dust. Muscles burn. Lungs burn. Eyes burn. At 4 we head home. Shower, dinner, a little reading, Star Trek, and exhausted collapse by 9.

Mother of puritan ethic always admonished hard work, "Or you will wind up a ditch-digger!" Which sounded horrible, but excusably my friend and I were there for the money for the life of guys. Motorcycle parts. Dates. We were to go back to our studies in September, but there were others with different purpose.

Porfy was a Mexican immigrant who worked alongside us every day. He was older, in his 40's, and had been with the company for several years. He rarely spoke as he knew little English, and there was suspicion that he was illegal and paid under the counter (Tony was not always up and up, and his heart gave out at 60). But Porfy never complained; about the heat, the dust, the tons of dirt and cement to be shoveled onto dump trucks. He squinted out from under his helmet with steady black eyes laid in sweat, and worked with purpose and efficiency missing from our strapping power. Because as I learned, he supported a wife and four children with this job - the same one I played at to score the smile of a girl at dinner and a trick fender for the Honda.

The first paycheck was pegged at $3 per hour, not the promised $5. What? All this for so Little? In what was the first of many discontinuities with authority, challenged the boss: Where was my money? "Well" he said, as if something else was promised, "You need to PROVE that you are worth $5 per hour." "I will ask your foreman Eddie, and if he agrees than you get your 5."

5 came in the next check, but the developer of the site ran short of money and the contractor laid us off - or so I was told. There was a kind of bounce off this job - which set me thinking about the people who make it happen by not complaining, rolling up their sleeves, and putting in good day's work. They are heroes too; like magnates and laureates, heart transplanters and evangelicals. They set aside great aspirations and risk, instead sacrificing hope of personal glory for the hopes and epic lives of others considered even greater.

There is a certain truth to goodness, even when wrongheaded, that imbues the spirit of leadership to the gallant efforts of workers who follow duty. Not everyone can be a great hero, but there is something transcendently noble in the silent toil of a family man.


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