Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

Signs of wealth are all around us. Do we notice and act accordingly?

I sit here on a Saturday morning in a coffee shop as usual “writing Pulitzer-winning essays” (what I tell passers by). And, as usual, someone is setting up the Bloody Mary bar. They put a few classes of ingredients into little metal buckets of ice.

Do we realize how much wealth it takes to make a metal bucket? The ore that is mined, the smelting (is that the right verb?), the refining, the processing, the transportation, and everything that happens before a cute little metal bucket sits on a counter.

And then there is the ice. A machine lowers the temperature of potable water (another sign of wealth) until it become solid ice. A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away I worked for months on end in places where we had no ice. The first day we had ice cubes is frozen in my mind. It changed my outlook on the day-to-day work of the work.

Signs of wealth surround us. Signs of miracles surround us. Yes, this can all be pretty naive. Still, it is in front of us. And then we argue about the size of the glass or whether we have too much or too little ice.