Loss of arm no handicap to construction worker

Faster than a good piece of gossip, word has spread throughout a neighborhood in downtown Columbia about a one-armed construction worker who’s busting it at a house site along Kipling Drive.

So I went to see what the buzz was all about.

Meet Carlos Angeles. Sit on a pile of red bricks bound together by green strapping and do your best not to stare while he goes about his business. You’ll find that’s impossible, of course, because watching him operate with his right arm and what little is left of his left arm is a spectacle of sheer strength and practiced skill.

But even more impressive than his dexterity when it comes to managing bricks, shovels, trowels and deep wheelbarrows full of wet cement is his singular determination to simply get the job done.

“It’s inspiring,” said Jim Johanneman, who lives nearby. “Carlos embodies the phrase, ‘Where there’s a will, there’s a way.’”

“The first day I saw him,” said another neighbor, “I said, ‘This is the American spirit.’ I mean, here it is. When you need inspiration, that’s what you look at.”

Carlos, 37, is soft-spoken about it all. He has just filled a deep wheelbarrow with wet cement. He has attached a homemade sling over his left shoulder and looped the other end of the sling under the handle of the wheelbarrow. And then he has pushed the 80-pound load across the uneven landscape of the construction site.

“I got bills to pay,” he said. “I got a family to take care of.”

So, you’re bound to ask, what’s the back story here?

Carlos grew up in Mexico. About eight years ago he was in a car accident there on a highway he describes as “like I-20.” An 18-wheeler hit his car. The husband and father of two little boys lost his left arm just below the shoulder.

But he didn’t lose his will to work.

“When I lost my arm, it wasn’t easy to start again. A lot of people come and ask me how I can climb on roofs and do what I do. I say, ‘When you want to work, you’re gonna do it.’ ”

Carlos moved to Columbia in 1993 and lives with his family in a trailer park north of the city.

When he’s not bricking, he’s roofing houses. Either way, he’s working from sun up to sun down to care for his immediate family and those he loves back home.

“As long as I can work, I can make money and live, you know? It don’t take me long to learn to do different jobs.”

And it didn’t take me long on this hot Monday morning to know I had met a man who makes no excuses but makes for the noble pursuit of plain hard work no matter what.

Know of a story that needs telling? Email salley@hartcom.net. Ms. McInerney is a writer whose novel, Journey Proud, is based upon growing up in Columbia in the early 1960s.