If you’ve never seen the movie, “The Simple Life of Noah Dearborn” with Sidney Poitier, you should. It’s a fascinating tale of an unassuming craftsman – a ‘carpenter god’ – a story that braids together the exposition of a work ethic and of an excellence bought to the profession and the life this man lived; and I don’t mean an excellence merely claimed, but an excellence truly lived. He was no politician.
Seeing this movie, one of my top ten favorites, I am impelled to look back over my life, and realize I have been exposed to many wonderful, instructive, or courageous exemplars of human nature and striving. Some people sent to me for my own improvement in my younger days I have forgotten, but in these later years, I begin to keep their inventory, an accounting of these special individuals, most of whom conduct their days unheralded and un-noticed by anyone, except perhaps by their intimates.
Those who come immediately to mind as I write include patients with courage and grace [Gunny who was rescued from the Siege of Bastogna; courageous, young Tessa besieged by a remorseless, wide-spread cancer from which no rescue proved possible; sometimes ‘chance ‘meetings with strangers [is there truly any such thing as a coincidence?]; and the men and women from all branches of medicine who teach or inspire me now, as they did on my way here.
I think of the ‘Grand Old Men’ of medicine, there when I was in medical school and internship. Some of the most influential – since I had by then awakened to this gift proffered – mine to accept or ignore – were the practitioners who had retired from full-time practice to work part-time in the Emergency Room at what was then called Roanoke Memorial Hospital. They were pediatricians and General Practitioners, GP’s of the old school: they could treat your pneumonia or diphtheria, deliver your baby, take out your appendix, and, if needed, cross-clamp your aorta. John Boyd, Bill Robinson, Paul Forth, Graham Stevens to name but a few. I hold them all in reverence for their knowledge and their patience with me.
But there are other remarkable people out there: stay-at-home moms, suddenly-single moms, the elderly who face each day alone as best they can with dwindling physical and cognitive reserves, and many others whose courage and steadfastness are not called upon now and then, but every waking hour.
Herself Who Must Be Obeyed and I are having some construction done here at Casa Garvin. Because of that, I have learned of another group; a group, who, along with others of their ilk, form the rib-cage of America’s economy: Blue Collar workers.
We hired a roofing company. The owner was a sixty-three- year-old ‘hands-on’ kind of guy. He was lean and hard as a locust post. In a blazing, day-long sun, he would shoulder two bundles of shingles, climb the ladder, then climb the roof, put down his burden, come down past his panting, exhausted, younger employees, and repeat the task. The weight of each bundle no less than seventy pounds.
We are putting up an out-building. The foundation poured and set, it was time to meet the builder who had won the bid. Early that morning, I heard his truck. I walked out; he was alone. His name is Robert.
“Where’s your crew?”
He turned his hands out in a way that told me I was looking at his crew. “I like things done just so.” He wasn’t kidding. Over the coming weeks, I watched a building coming together the old fashioned way: one 2×4 at a time. Everyday at 8:00 AM, he arrived; at 5:00 he left. In the meanwhile, shy the ten minutes it took him to eat his lunch on the tail-gate, he never stopped moving. If I drove past him and beeped, he would throw a hand over his shoulder, never turning his head. This is not rudeness; this is pure concentration.
He is a 59 year-old man you’d never pick out of a crowd, just like Noah Dearborn and me. No big bulging muscles, but my Lord! Three 2x8x10 boards swung up at once to his shoulder, moved 60 feet, set down with no shortness of breath and nary a grunt. [Try it sometime.] He carries a 4’x8’ sheet of plywood up the ladder and nails it perfectly into place – again and again.
If you cooked this man, you couldn’t get your fork in his gravy.
I take a great interest now in looking for these often unassuming, but ever so special individuals. “Common” is not a synonym for worthless, sometimes far from it. I am convinced they are around us each day, sometimes – oft-times – dressed in the everyday, the so called average, the seemingly commonplace.
Like Noah. Like Robert.