Frank Sharpe lives across the alley from us in Edmonton, in a neighborhood populated by professors, doctors, and architects—people who employ long words and are often short of patience. Busy. Busy. Busy.
Frank claims, “I’m just a bricklayer.” Which is like Pablo Picasso saying, “I dabble.”
Frank is my age—maybe a year younger if he’s telling the story—and he has that quiet confidence of a man who has spent a lifetime doing one thing extremely well… and sees no reason to advertise it.
And yet, if you pressed him—if you really insisted—he might admit that he’s laid not just a few walls, but something closer to hundreds of miles of brickwork across Canada. Schools, buildings, homes—structures that will likely outlast all of us, standing quietly, doing their job, just as he does.
Back here in our neighborhood, there isn’t a single person who doesn’t think Frank is a great guy.
Not one.
He’s the kind of man who never offends, never intrudes, never raises his voice—just a smile, a nod, and a gentle, “How are you doing?” as if he actually plans to remember the answer.
And I suspect—though he would never quite say it—that Frank thinks he’s a little less than the people around him. No college degree. No framed certificates. No Latin phrases on the wall.
He looks at professors and doctors the way some people look at constellations.
What he doesn’t quite see is that he’s more special than all of them.
Months ago he drove past our house and noticed something I had been studying for weeks without actually seeing.
Our flower box—five or six bricks high—was beginning to lean. Not dramatically. Not enough to alarm a casual observer. But enough to make a homeowner think, I should probably do something about that, and then immediately sit down and recover from the thought.
Frank spotted it from thirty or forty feet away.
Fifteen minutes later, he was back. Apron on. Tools in hand. No fanfare.
“I noticed those bricks are a bit loose,” he said.
I wondered how a man could diagnose masonry at highway speed, but I’ve since concluded it’s like a pianist hearing a wrong note from across the room.
You don’t learn it.
You become it.
“We’ll need a bit of mortar,” he said. “Let’s go get some.”
We drove off, spent maybe five dollars, and came back. Frank began mixing the mortar in a way that suggested complete improvisation—pouring water, stirring casually, as if he were making soup and hoping for the best.
He was not hoping for the best.
He was guaranteeing it.
What struck me was this: he never looked at his tools. Not once. He reached into his bag while talking and pulled out exactly what he needed—scraper, trowel, whatever—like a magician who had memorized the deck years ago and grown bored with applause.
Then he started removing bricks.
There were four loose ones.
Frank removed ten.
He took them out in a pattern he never explained, never paused to consider, never marked. Just lifted, stacked, and moved on—as if the wall had already told him how it wanted to come apart.
Then came the part I still can’t quite explain.
He began talking to the bricks.
Not loudly. Not for my benefit. Just a quiet, conversational murmur, like a man checking in with old friends.
“You’ve got six sides,” he said to one of them. “Which one do you want facing out?”
I stood there, wondering if I should answer on behalf of the brick, or at least introduce myself.
“We’ll get you facing right,” he continued. “You’ve got to last here a while.”
He rubbed each brick clean—almost affectionately—then laid down the mortar.
Now, when I work with mortar, I manage to get about half of it onto the project and the other half onto myself, the ground, and occasionally neighboring properties.
Frank lost nothing.
Not a drop. Not a smear. Not even a suspicious speck.
Fifteen minutes later, the bricks went back—same order, same rhythm—like a puzzle that had solved itself before you opened the box.
He finished.
I went for a broom.
There was nothing to clean.
Not a grain of mortar where it didn’t belong. Not a fingerprint. Not even a hint that anything had happened—except that the wall now stood as if it had been born that way and had always intended to remain so.
Frank had to run. Another job. Another quiet act of structural salvation.
I bought him a beer later, which he accepted in the same understated way he accepts everything else—as if it were pleasant, but entirely unnecessary.
That was a couple of years ago.
That flower box is still standing like the Rock of Gibraltar.
There must be a word somewhere—maybe in Sanskrit, maybe in a language we’ve forgotten—for a person who speaks to materials, listens to them, and leaves them better than he found them.
If there is, it probably translates roughly as:
“Not just a bricklayer.”
The professors may understand the world.
Frank quietly has been holding it together.
