Several years ago I rescued a house from the city’s bulldozer. Fluorescent red placards on the doors already announced the demolition date when I offered to buy this sadly neglected residence from the elderly lady who had moved off and abandoned it.
When it finally was mine, I went to work shoring up the floors, propping up the sagging roof, hanging missing doors, renewing rusted plumbing, and replacing windows busted out by the neighborhood hoodlums.
As I puttered around the old house, gradually I grew familiar with distinctive marks of work done by a faceless craftsman almost half a century before I arrived on the scene. He had sided the exterior of the house, for example, with concrete expertly tinted and trowelled to look like brick.
In the months I spent resurrecting that house, I noticed several other nearby homes clothed in the same unique fake brick design, obviously the handiwork of the same fellow. Oldtimers in the area confirmed that all those houses had been built by the same man.
Do you know how much work it is to pour concrete? Vertically? Decades after the job was completed, I still was awed by the evidences of that mason’s skill and industriousness. It appeared that he spent several years of his life constructing those houses, by sweat equity slowly amassing a nest egg to support himself and his family.
How long did he live to enjoy his profits? Did the drudgery do him in early? Questions like this kept popping into my head every time I stumbled across some reminder of his labor. Did this builder I never knew look back with contentment and pride on the work he had done, or did he regret spending his days counterfeiting bricks? I wondered.
Life’s not long enough for any of us to waste any of it. “We’re all puffs of air,” as David said in the 39th Psalm. “We’re all shadows in a campfire. We’re just spit in the wind,” the Shepherd-King lamented. “We make our pile, and then we leave it.”
The day came when the man who worked so hard on those houses couldn’t work anymore. The day came when the dollars he made no longer mattered. If he made a pile, so what? He left it all behind, just like all of us will. And some day nobody will be around to stop the bulldozers like I did. Then the last traces of his work will vanish.