Blood, Sweat and Tears

"and finding answers is forgetting all the questions we called home."  David Hodges


My long-term memory is much better than my short-term memory. But "long-term memory" is a relative thing. There are some things that I remember that happened  forty or fifty years ago that are crystal clear. Then there are memories that are rather fuzzy. These are not to be confused with the memories that are very fuzzy. I have other memories that I really can't call "memories" because all  I remember is  that I was there and that something happened. How can I call that "remembering"? Finally, there is another category of memory such as what happened today.  I had a "memory fragment" pop in my head out of nowhere.  I imagine that something I saw triggered it, but I don't know what. Try as I might, the fragment itself was all that I could recall. In brain processing time, it was a piece of a second..

"What difference does it make?" I asked myself.  "Think about something else."   But I couldn't think about anything else.  When something's on my mind, there it is!  I kept trying to remember more of the fragment.  I couldn't remember anything else. But the  fragment led to things I could remember.

The backstory to the fragment is this.  My father had a concrete business. He and his crew of about ten men poured sidewalks, head walls, flumes, curb and gutter. From time to time they poured driveways as well. Helms Construction had a good reputation in the Enterprise area for doing good work at at reasonable price. And Dad delivered what he promised.  Because of that he had a good relationship with customers, suppliers and even city, county and state inspectors.  Everybody liked him. The business he had inherited from his father was significantly  larger, but its size and demands got in the way of his fishing and golfing, so Dad pared it down  more to his liking.  Helms Construction is  where I worked for three long, hot summers.

Pop, my grandfather, and his partner owned Mullins and Helms Construction, a thriving concern in Enterprise.  They, along with  my father,  operated a full-blown concrete operation. The firm owned four concrete mixer trucks, a large loader, a  storage building for supplies, a large conveyor and bin for mixing cement and concrete. A separate office building.  And huge piles of sand and gravel. We called it "the plant."  They also did all the things I mentioned that Helms Construction eventually did.. I remember the plant, but I never worked for that operation. But what I remembered today made me wonder.

Concrete work during south Alabama summers was hot and dirty and grimy and physically uncomfortable. I did a lot of different things in the course of a summer. One job I had for an entire summer of 1970 involved shoveling concrete onto the wings of a flume as the concrete poured from the shoot from the truck. My brother drove the small tractor that pulled the form behind the concrete while one other person and I spread the concrete in the trench to create the flume.  Hard to explain. The point is he was sitting on the tractor making more money than I was shoveling the concrete. Privileges of the first born.The heat of the concrete that had been cooking in  the truck was mixed with the heat of the midday sun. To add to the misery, very often concrete would splash from the shoot down the back of my neck.  So now by the end of the day I had tired, aching muscles in my arms, back and shoulders, the heat of the sun mixed with sweat  with hot concrete down my shirt,    "Quitting time" was my favorite part of the day. Then shower, supper, play chess with Dad. Go to bed. Get up early and do it all again the next day.

That's the backstory. This is the fragment.  For no particular reason, today I remembered driving a dump truck to Bellwood, Alabama and picking up a load of sand. That's it.  I'm sure I did that. But it doesn't make good sense on several levels.  1. Dad bought all  of his concrete which was delivered to the job in trucks. He wouldn't need a load of sand.  2. Why would Pop have asked me to get one dump truck load of sand when I didn't work for  him and he had piles of sand at the plant? 3. If I just wanted to play in the sand I would have driven 90 miles to the family house at Laguna Beach where I wouldn't have needed a dump truck. Bellwood is only twelve miles from Enterprise and they do have a sand pit there, so it is not unreasonable that I would get sand there. I just don't know why. Can't ask Dad or Pop. Not going to ask my brother because he would just say, "What difference does it make?"

On a recent trip to Enterprise, my brother and I visited one of the men who worked for Dad. He worked for Helms Construction over 30 years.  He's in his late eighties now.  He's still in good health and lives alone. The three of us enjoyed reminiscing together about working together all those years ago.  His favorite story he told was inevitable. I knew what was coming.  "I'll never forget that day your dad got so mad at you he threw a shovel at your feet and said,   'If you weren't my son, I'd fire you!'"

Have you ever wondered what my motivation was for  all that college?  Now you know.