Shouldn’t we all be full of gratitude for all things that have blessed our lives? I remember being a young, newly married man attending college on the G.I. bill and working half-time as an apprentice bricklayer for a local brick company. The paychecks for a week’s work were passed out by the foreman on the job. The foreman on this particular job was an old German with many years’ experience and much nohow about bricks and bricklaying. At the end of my first week on the job he came by and handed me my check and I looked to see how much I had earned and immediately realized it was way more than an apprentice was eligible for. I hurried after him to tell him that I was paid too much. He looked at me, and without looking at my check, merely said in his broken English, “Vell, get in dare and earn it den.” All four years, while attending college, I worked for that company with very few times when there was no work or it was too cold to work. I always received journeyman’s wages as an apprentice. The boss was an older man who had started the brick business and had, himself, been a bricklayer. Several times when he came around he would stop along the wall we were building to observe our work. Several of those times he stopped by me and watched me lay brick for a few minutes and then pass on. I thought, during those times, that he would see my work and think that it may not be journeyman level work and would ask me what my status was, but he never did. I never lied, I never tried to get something I hadn’t earned, because when ‘Gus’ the old German foreman told me to, “Get in there and earn it then”, that is exactly what I tried to do. On a long wall, working beside older journeyman, I believe that I put as many brick in the wall as they did, and laid them straight as well. If I hadn’t, I know that I would have been called out about it but it never happened. Am I grateful? Am I grateful for that blessing in my life? Yes, for that blessing and all the others I have received over the years. Nobody was there at the end to allow me to say thank you in person, no one to receive my gratitude. It was almost as if I could have heard a faint, “Hi Ho Silver” off in the distance, my benefactor(s) riding off before they could be recognized for their heroism.
That isn’t the way it always is for some people stand around waiting for a pound of gratitude. They wait for the shy smile, the stumbling words of thanks or maybe a few tears of gratitude. When we seek gratitude we are robbed of the true inner happiness which comes to us when we do good and then disappear. That is the way I would like to be rewarded for any good that I have done. I also believe my benefactors felt the same way, because they were nowhere to be found. “Hi Ho Silver.”