The smell of fresh concrete jogs my memory whenever I catch a whiff of it in Kakaako, where high-rise construction is changing the landscape one floor at a time.

When I walk past the job sites on Pohukaina and Auahi streets, which teem with workers wearing highlighter-yellow T-shirts, I think of my summers as a laborer at Craigside in Nuuanu and, a year later, at Executive Centre on Bishop Street. Those were hard days for me, and time has not lessened my respect for the men — and, now, women — who lean into that back-breaking work.

The experience left my hands blistered (then callused), my feet minus my big toenails and my character changed for the better. It also paid for my graduate school education in Iowa.

My first day put me in my place. I was more naive than arrogant, but 12 hours earlier I had worn a cap and gown and that counted for nothing on the job site. Now I was wearing a gold-colored plastic hard hat and a patina made from dirt and concrete dust.

Even dirty, a college student is hard to hide. As much as I wanted to fit in, even if for a summer, the differences between me and my co-workers created too much of a divide: economic, educational, cultural. Co-workers would stare me in the face and yell at me in languages I didn’t understand. Even when they were joking, I didn’t get it, except when the joke was at my expense.

But all that is quickly forgotten when it’s time to work, and on a construction site the work is endless.

I stacked lumber. I unstacked lumber. I pulled nails. I pried sheets of plywood from the bottom of freshly poured floors. And then one day I was promoted to a crew that shoveled concrete. It came with a 50-cents-an-hour raise, and I was grateful for every penny.

Shoveling concrete became the task I did more than anything else, and it hit a zenith for me at Executive Centre, 15 floors above the city. I worked at the highest point of the building on an open-air platform called a slip form. Every other day I shoveled concrete that became the walls of the building, while the slip form — which had a footprint that covered the entire shape of Executive Centre — rose an inch or so every few minutes.

I was too weak to move the wheelbarrow that carried the concrete, so I was paired with a massive man named Asi. We worked together all summer. He pushed the wheelbarrow. I shoveled concrete.

Sometimes Asi would grab me by the front of my shirt and shake me like a rag doll for no apparent reason. It was never malicious, as best as I could tell. One day, though, after he was done shaking me, Asi gave me a serious look.

“When you graduate from school,” he said, “you come back and be Asi’s boss? Yes?”

I stood there, muted by my surprise.

“You work hard,” Asi said.

And there it was, my validation. No one I worked with had ever told me that.

It felt like betrayal to say no, and Asi frowned when I told him I was going to be a writer instead.

After that, Asi never grabbed me by the shirt. He never again shook me like a toy or asked if I would be his boss.

We just worked.

Reach Mike Gordon at 529-4803 or email mgordon@staradvertiser.com.