One brick at a time.

[sarettah]

So, I'm working in my yard today, cleaning up the mess I made yesterday. I had cut a bunch of bushes down and a tree or three, so today I had to get it all cut up and piled neatly so I can get it up into the pickup.

Anyway, I don't know about any of you, but when I am doing mindless work my mind wanders all over the place. Today I was recalling 1982, right after I got out of the military. I had gone to work for a wholesale liquor company and when the Kansas City warehouse closed I transferred out to West Texas as office and warehouse manager for one of the branches. In Texas I became pretty tight with both the office and warehouse crew. The office was 3 young women, quite nice and the warehouse were 8 or so Tex Mex guys. There was Hippy, the warehouse foreman. Henry, an older guy that got diagnosed with Leukemia and died while I was there, Gordo, Ruben and several other guys, some who I can picture but no longer bring the name to mind.

There was one in particular, Ruben's cousin. He was building a house one cinder block at a time.

When I first got there in fall '82 he had one layer of cinder blocks laid out in the base shape of the house. When I left, in Fall of '83 he was putting the roof on the place.

Each payday he would buy however many cinder blocks he could work into the budget that payday. Sometimes it was 5 or 10 and sometimes it was only one and I know there were several paydays where for one reason or another he couldn't afford any.

In the space of less than 2 years, on a pretty meager salary, he had managed to build himself a house, one brick at a time.

There's something to be learned there.