For thirty-four years he worked construction. He started at eighteen on a site where they still mixed by hand, and he came off the tools at fifty-two because his shoulders had finished, and then he did four more years of smaller jobs because he could not sit still.
He carried timber until those shoulders went. He poured concrete in February with his knuckles cracked open and bleeding into the gloves. He was up on roofs in July at an age when every other man on that site had stopped going up, because the money was better up there and because he had never once said no to it.
And whenever I needed anything at all growing up, that man produced it inside about four days.
Not with a speech. Not with a conversation about what things cost, which is a conversation I have had about four hundred times since with people who had more money than he did.
It simply appeared, on a Thursday, and was never mentioned again.
A coat. A trip. Four hundred dollars for something at school that I have completely forgotten and that he almost certainly has not.
When I went to college, he sold his motorbike.
He had had that bike eleven years.
