Читать книгу A Life Constructed - Delon Hampton - Страница 7

THERE AREN’T too many big cities in America where I can’t see one of the building blocks of the career and the life I have constructed as prime consultant or major sub-consultant.

You have probably seen them as well.

In Los Angeles, there are underground rail stations at Fifth and Hill Street, Civic Center, and Pershing Square and the double-barrel transit tunnel connecting them to Union Station. In Chicago, there are the new Comiskey Park, a section of that city’s deep tunnel and reservoir system (“Deep Tunnel”), and the rail line connecting the city to Chicago O’Hare International. In Atlanta, there is the MART A rail line that snakes its way through the hub of the South and the water treatment plants and the West Combined Sewer Overflow tunnel that keep the city humming. And in my company’s home of Washington, DC, there is the Capitol Visitors Center through which every visitor to the US Capitol passes, the ever-bustling Gallery Place Chinatown complex and adjacent Verizon Center I pass each time I go to my office two blocks away, the Pepco headquarters building, Nationals’ Baseball Stadium, the mixed use development, City Center, whose construction I am pleased to watch from my office window each work day, and Dulles International and Ronald Reagan Washington National airports I see each time I travel out of town.

Whenever I see these projects and others that my firm helped create in my more than fifty years as a professional engineer, they still make me feel proud.

But more than that, they make me feel very fortunate.

Today, the company I founded in 1973 has been involved with thousands of projects around the country. I have climbed to the pinnacle of my profession, and it has taken me all around the world. I have taught and mentored thousands of others, in the classroom and in my business and in my chosen field.

I am a very lucky man.

For a black kid who skirted gang violence and other hazards in inner-city Chicago; who was raised by an eighth-grade-educated mother who wasn’t actually my mother; who overcame racial barriers during the time of Jim Crow and de jure segregation to earn a PhD, become a professor and then the CEO of a multi-million-dollar company I built from scratch with the help of others, I have much to feel lucky about.

And yet, the life I have constructed has come at a cost. It is still lacking some essential pillars that would have made it better, stronger, more satisfying.

An only-in-America story such as mine contains lessons for anyone seeking success. But it also holds the lessons of what the pursuit of such success can cost: friends and family members forgotten and lost, broken marriages, a childless life.

A few days before these words were written, I took a trip back to the very footings of the foundation of my life. It carried me back to a little town in Northeast Texas, where I met a cousin I knew better from business functions than from family gatherings. He was kind enough to take me for the very first time to the grave of the mother I never knew, as well as to those of the aunts and uncles and cousins I knew only in passing, and through the town in which I was born.

As I read the name on my birth mother’s gravestone I was shocked that her given name, Alzadie, was spelled differently than the given name on my birth certificate, Elzatie. Which is correct? For now, I am assuming the spelling on the gravestone is correct.

My trip left me with an emptiness and a regret for never knowing my mother or many members of my family, but also with an appreciation for what my family accomplished and experienced, as well as a fullness for the successes I’ve been fortunate to experience.

Like the buildings, airports, train stations, and other structures that will be here long after I am gone, the life I have constructed was built from the ground up, with plenty of challenges and problems along the way. Its structure is complicated, yet simple. It is built solidly, but over the years has become a bit weathered and developed a few cracks.

This is my story.