The hardest working man I've ever known

I'm a lucky guy. I get to make my living largely with my mind. It wasn't always that way for me. I started working young, and I worked several physically hard jobs. I think of those jobs when someone with a cushy tech position complains about how hard the work is or how long the hours are. When someone really pitches a fit or just manages to get under my skin, I think about the hardest working man I've ever known.

I don't remember his name. I feel bad about that. He deserves more respect from me than that, but there it is: I can't remember his name.

I can, though, still picture him vividly. I met him the summer I was seventeen, when I worked construction in the scorching summer sun. He was just under six feet tall, all ropy muscles and tendons, almost no body fat, skin tanned like leather, hands so rough he might as well have been wearing work gloves, black hair in a buzz cut. When we had to move concrete forms--four foot by eight foot pieces of three-quarter-inch plywood with a three-quarter-inch piece of heavy foam covering one side--everyone on the site carried one at a time. Those suckers were heavy. You stood one up, squatted next to you, got it on your back, and walked it across the site to where the foreman told you to go.

He carried two. If he was pissed at something--we never knew what, because he never complained, but we could tell when he was angry--he carried three. Guys twice his size feared his strength.

We all worked from seven-thirty in the morning until four o'clock, or later if we were pouring concrete and couldn't stop or if the job demanded it; we were all hungry for the overtime. As soon as the foreman dismissed us, he left the site and drove straight to a gas station, where he worked until it closed at eleven. He then joined a demolition gang and worked until two or three in the morning, when he headed home and grabbed four hours of sleep. On the weekends, when the site was closed (we were working at a VA center), he worked only the other two jobs.

When I knew him, he had worked at least part of every day--and I do mean every day--for over twelve years.

I didn't come from money--far from it--and I was a hard worker, but he was a breed apart, and I was curious about him. Over the course of the summer, we talked a bit here and a bit there, and I got a little more information about him from the foreman.

He was the oldest of five kids. A few months after he turned sixteen, his parents and one of his siblings were in an extremely bad auto accident. I never learned how it happened, but what happened was clear: it crippled both parents and left the sibling forever mentally challenged. Neither his father nor his mother could ever work again.

The disability money from social security wasn't much, as you might expect, and they had no insurance, as you also might expect. This man dropped out of school and started working. He took care of his parents, he paid for everything he could, and he made damn sure that each and every one of his siblings finished high school and went on to some higher education, either a state university or the local community college. He was fiercely proud of their achievements--and he always spoke of it that way, their achievements, not his.

So I was sitting here tonight, feeling sorry for myself. My back pain has recurred big-time. I suspect I have a hiatal hernia. My weight is up sixty pounds in eighteen months from stress. I'm fretting over my novel, as always, wondering if I'm doing well enough. My kids are out of school and I worry about whether I can give them enough time, if I'm a decent dad. And so on.

As I often do in such moments, I thought of this guy, this man, the hardest working man I've ever known.

People who get to know me wonder what makes me so driven. They ask why I work so hard, care so much, act so fierce.

I'm not fierce, not really. I'm a wuss--at least compared to that guy. That guy taught me what it meant to work hard. I grew up largely without a father, but in him I saw what a man does to take care of those who are his to care for. I witnessed a truly noble sacrifice, a hero, an ordinary one but a hero nonetheless, not one of the super-powered heroes I loved in comic books but one whose only power was his utter determination to do what he believed he should.

I wish I remembered his name, but I don't, and I can't fix that. I've told his story to friends but never, before now, publicly. I can't honor him any other way.

Except this: I can try to teach others to carry their loads and do their jobs, and I can stop my complaining, get back to work, and try to be half the man he was.