When I was a teenager in high school I was riding with my father through the downtown area of the small town where I grew up. On one of the street corners was standing a very large African American man. My father rolled down the widow and began talking with the man. They exchanged pleasantries and we drove away. I asked – “who was that?” My father told me his name and then began to describe almost super-human stories about what this man had done when they worked together on construction jobs over the years. He told about how this man had stood on one side of a concrete chute that had fallen and lifted it while seven other men lifted the other side. He also described how this guy had lifted a car all by himself out of a ditch. But the story that caught my attention was about how one morning all by himself he had mixed 39 batches of mortar by hand for a brick laying crew when the automatic mixer had broken down.
Little did I know that a few short years later, at 19 years of age I would get to test myself to see how well I measured up to this story. I worked as a general laborer for a brick-mason company during the summer after my freshman year of college. We were building an apartment complex consisting of a series of low-rise apartment buildings and a community center in the middle of the complex. On one of the mornings when we were working on the community center, the mortar mixer broke down. Our crew was comprised of seven brick-layers and two general laborers (me being one of the two laborers). The job of the laborers was to build the scaffolding, mix the mortar, and provide the bricks and mortar to each of the masons in a timely fashion (in other words we had to keep the masons working smoothly or everything broke down).
That morning, as usual the laborers had started 30 minutes earlier than the rest of the crew to get things started. Just after we had set out the mortar boards (yes – there are real mortar boards – not just the type attached to academic caps), we loaded the bricks and started the mixer to get the mortar ready. The mixer sputtered and stopped. The masons were arriving on the job and our boss was concerned that he would be stuck paying for a crew that couldn’t get anything done. I looked at the other laborer named Verne and said – “we can do this.” He smiled and said – I think we can too. We said to our boss – “we can do this…you go and get replacement parts and we’ll keep things going.” He looked at us very skeptically and said “ok let’s see how it goes.”
The bulk of the materials were located at the front of the building. We were set up to work in the rear of the building. It had rained a great deal the past few nights and the job-site was full of mud so we couldn’t use the flat-bed truck to haul the materials to the rear of the building. Everything needed to be carried by hand to the rear. I looked at Verne and said, help me load the bags of mortar onto my shoulders (each bag weighed 70 pounds). I placed the first one my right shoulder – he placed a second on top of that – and then I grabbed a third with my left arm and cradled it to my side as I began walking around the building through the mud, hoping that my boots wouldn’t get stuck. I made two quick trips so that I had six bags to start while Verne laid out a plank walk-way around building to wheel a brick-barrow with bricks.
I immediately grabbed a mixing hoe started mixing the mortar in an old-fashioned mortar tub. I bent over at 7:50 am and didn’t straighten up until noon, mixing non-stop until our lunch break. My whole body entered into the process of straining against the handle. Back and forth, then chopping up and down, my arms pushed and pulled the blade as I mixed bag after bag of mortar. My legs bent and swayed forward and backward supporting my spine as every part of my body contributed to the task.
When we finally broke for lunch our boss had just arrived back with parts to fix the mixer. Verne looked at me and said, guess how many you did. I had no idea, I had been far too intensely focused on keeping the masons fully occupied with enough mortar. He smiled – 39. I couldn’t believe it…and neither could he. Our boss was even more amazed. He definitely wasn’t given to handing out compliments…but even he smiled and said – “that was pretty good.” Thinking back on that day from this vantage point – I can’t even imagine doing something like that today in my late fifties. That body no longer exists.
Todd Rivetti 