013 It Was Hard Physical Labor

Week 13 of 2024 I laughed so much yesterday as I recalled working on the “rock pile” as a kid. Sharing stories with my dad and my uncle, I had forgotten about those days. My brothers and I learned work ethic very early on from them. It was the type of work made for grown men, but in the summers it paid so much more than fast food restaurants and mowing lawns. I didn’t know until years later that those men were masters of brick and stone masonry, a forgotten skill. There were long hours in the sun, picking up heavy rocks and bringing them to the elders who would shape them with tools and place them strategically on the walls. Sometimes the rock was the wrong shape and you would have to bring another and they were extremely heavy for us kids. We would have to mix cement in wheel barrows and roll them to where the men could use it and the higher the wall got, the harder it was to get cement up the scaffolding. The pay was cash, either daily or weekly.  Nothing compares to the stories shared, the songs that were sang, or the many laughs. I remembered the time I dropped an entire load of mixed cement because I lost balance and wasn’t strong enough to hold the wheel barrow up. No one helped me or rushed to my aid. They pointed to a shovel as they laughed and I had to shovel the cement back in and try again. We learned how to deal with the heat, preserve energy, use our legs to lift, and so many other invaluable skills. All this said to demonstrate the benefit of having someone like me, my brothers, my dad, my uncle and those type people on your team in todays time. We are relentless in our pursuit to get a job done. Obstacles are only opportunities to figure out how to overcome them. We are able to find joy in the most difficult times. We understand that there will be long hours and there are few jobs that will be tougher physically than those days. Everything after is considered “light work”. In this age of A.I. and technology, we sometimes have to be reminded of who we are and of our capabilities to manually get things done. We are so much stronger, physically and mentally, than what we  know until we are pushed  past our percieved limitations.  I’m so thankful for those days as a youth and how they still remind me of who I am.