Calories Burned, Dollars Earned, Lessons Learned :: Personal Narrative Writing

Calories Burned, Dollars Earned, Lessons Learned "Ben, I'm going to be frank with you. You're not the strongest mudboy I've ever had. In fact, you're about the weakest." And thus my boss concisely summarized the last month of my work as his laborer. A mudboy, by definition, is a mason's bitch, whose sole purpose during the workday is to supply the masons with a constant flow of bricks and mud so they can build without slowing down. This poses a challenging task for a young, fairly weak 17 year old who must constantly (for a nine-hour day with one 15-minute break) mix mud to the right consistency, wheelbarrow the mixture over to the ladder, haul it up to the second story in buckets, heave the mud into mudpans, scale down the ladder, grab a tong of bricks (a metal clamp that holds about 11 bricks), run up and down the ladder several more times to refill the brick supply, only to climb back down to make some more mud because the mudpans are about empty. While I was doing all of this running and hauling each weekday during the August of 1999, my boss Richard and his brother Phil loudly and eagerly spewed their wisdom upon me. Their continuous verbalized insight included explanations of how evil Democrats are, how I should base my future career on money instead of personal interest, how great their last mudboy was, how I should praise U.S. foreign policy, and why I should never ever become a mason. After waking up at five each morning and driving to my job site in the next county, my first priority as a mudboy was making mud. I broke the bag of mortar mix and inhaled the stinging scent of brick mortar as the acidic powder flew into my nostrils. Nine shovelfuls of sand, five gallons of water, and one fifty-pound bag of mortar mix later, I had the day's initial batch of mud brewing in the large steel mixer. Making my very first mud mixture on the first day of work was not a pleasant experience since, as a naà ¯ve, amateur mudboy, I had not put on good gloves that morning. This foolish decision brought me the unique, intense pain created when masonry mud is combined with brick scuffs and scratches. I distinctly remember the raw burning sensation of rough Tudor bricks scraping against fingertips that had already lost sections of skin because the chemical-filled mud had burned through the upper layers of the epidermis.