Posted on: Monday, September 20, 2004

ABOUT MEN

By Mike Leidemann
Advertiser Staff Writer

A guy I know who worked construction jobs in the early 1970s to pay for college likes to take his daughter for a drive through Waikiki once in a while, pointing to some of the big hotels along the beach and Ala Wai.

"I did that," he tells her. "I did that one, too."

These days he's got a job behind a desk and spends most of his day selling things on the phone. When his work is done, there's nothing to point to. It's all inside of a computer somewhere.

It makes him mad. After a few beers, it makes him a little morose. He knows what he does is important; there's just nothing to point to, nothing to say "I did that."

Lately, I've been thinking of him each morning as I drive past Castle Junction, where for months now construction crews have been tearing down a hillside. Men in machines bigger than my house are moving a mountain, little by little. They are bulldozing it into a gentle, safer slope and hauling away the excess dirt, 240,000 cubic yards of it in all.

The men inside the bulldozers and extended dump trucks look strong, proud and bored. They sit with their engines idling, trailers rumbling and cigarettes dangling.

They're making a living the old-fashioned way: by doing something. It's hard, monotonous work, but satisfying.

Or at least that's how I imagine it.

You can almost see the envy of most men driving by that construction site at a rush-hour snail's pace. It was Thomas Edison who said: "There is no substitute for hard work." I wonder if he ever imagined how some of his inventions might undermine the truth of that statement.

When the No. 56 bus stalled next to the construction zone one day, I noticed that all the men on board watched intently as the big earth mover swung its huge arm back and forth, slowly filling up the waiting trucks.

I'm sure I wasn't the only one on the bus flashing back to a childhood sand box filled with Tonka Toys or some building project shared with a father handy with tools.

The women on the bus, on the other hand, didn't seem to notice or care about the trucks. Their faces stayed buried in books, or they just stared ahead. They didn't seem awed by the sweaty drama going on outside.

We all got downtown together and scurried to our offices. I like to think my own work is important, even if it has a shelf life of about 24 hours. But I'm betting I wasn't the only man who stared out of a cubicle later that day, daydreaming about men who can build high-rises or tear down mountains.

I bet I wasn't the only one who would drive past that pared-down hillside one day and wish he could say: "I did that."

Reach Mike Leidemann at mleidemann@honoluluadvertiser.com or 525-5460.