The night my city went dark, politicians argued on TV while I climbed a frozen pole with a headlamp and a prayer—and that’s pretty much my whole life in one picture.

My name’s Ray Delgado. I’m 69.
I didn’t grow up with much—just a mother who worked nights at the hospital and a toolbox my uncle left me when he shipped out to Vietnam. I learned early that if a thing was broken, no one was coming to rescue it. You either fixed it or you learned to live without it.

For nearly five decades I kept the grid breathing—stringing new line, swapping transformers at midnight, crawling through crawlspaces that smelled like damp wood and old promises. I wore steel-toe boots until they felt like part of my feet. I wore a tool belt so long my hips know the shape of it when I sleep.

People think electricity is magic. It isn’t. It’s math, sweat, and respect—respect for something that can light your kitchen or stop your heart. You don’t learn that from a clip on the internet. You learn it when ice coats a wire and the wind is daring you to lose your grip.

Last spring my grandson, Mateo, asked me to speak at his public high school in Dayton, Ohio. “Career Day,” he said. “We want real jobs, Grandpa.” I showed up with a battered voltage tester and a coil of Romex. The other guests wheeled in ring lights and laptops. There were two doctors, a software engineer, a man who “advises fintech startups,” and a woman who runs a wellness brand with a podcast and a hashtag. I was the only one who smelled like dielectric grease.

When it was my turn, I didn’t have slides. I had scars. I told those kids, “Look, I never went to college. I went to work. When a derecho knocks out half the county, when hurricanes chew the coast, when wildfire smoke turns the sky the color of bad tea, someone has to put America back together. A lot of nights, that someone was me and folks like me.”

They stopped fidgeting. They listened.

A hand shot up from the back. A tall kid with nervous shoulders asked, “So… you’re the guy who touches the stuff everyone else is scared of?”

I grinned. “Only after I make it safe. But yeah—when it’s dangerous, that’s when we clock in.”

After the bell, a quiet girl with chipped pink nail polish waited by the door. She told me her dad cleans city buses at night. “People act like he’s invisible,” she said. “They laugh at his hands.”

I looked her in the eye. “Tell your dad when folks get to work on time, they’re riding the shine he puts on those buses. This country runs because people like him don’t.”

Here’s what I know after a lifetime of early mornings and late nights: America runs on skilled hands. On the plumber who stops your basement from becoming a lake. On the HVAC tech who gives the nursing home heat in January. On the diesel mechanic who keeps milk moving from farm to store. On the lineworker who makes sure a dialysis machine hums through a storm.

We spent twenty years telling kids there’s one golden ticket—a four-year degree or you’re a failure. Meanwhile, we turned shop class into a storage closet and called it progress. Now we’ve got bridges that need welding, pipes that need replacing, roofs that need laying, and a generation drowning in student debt for jobs they don’t love and can’t find.

During the pandemic, someone put a new name on what we’ve always done: “essential.” They clapped at 7 p.m., and that felt nice. But respect can’t clock out when the applause fades. Respect looks like funding apprenticeships, paying a living wage, and telling the truth: college is great for some, not required for dignity.

I told the students about my union hall—how old-timers taught me to tie a bowline blindfolded and how, in return, I taught new apprentices not to fake their torque readings. We argued about football and politics, but when the call came, we loaded the trucks in the same silence. There’s a sermon in that silence: it says, “The job matters more than our differences.”

A week later, Mateo’s teacher emailed me. “That shy girl?” she wrote. “She signed up for a CTE program—wants to be a welder. Says she’s proud of her dad’s hands.” I sat at my kitchen table with my coffee going cold and laughed like an old man—quiet, from the chest. Then I cried a little. I’m allowed; I’ve earned it.

I think about that frozen night all the time. The news anchors were arguing about who was to blame—regulators, utilities, supply chains, take your pick. Out there in the lift bucket, the only debate that mattered was, “Is the line dead? Is my partner clipped in? Can I get this neighborhood warm before sunrise?” I wasn’t fixing policy. I was fixing power. One doesn’t cancel out the other—but one of them gets your grandmother’s oxygen machine running right now.

So here’s my small sermon, cut plain:

Not everyone needs a corner office to change the world. Some of us pour the concrete those corners rest on. Some of us string the wire that lets those meetings happen. Some of us mop the floors so the next crew starts clean. That’s not second-class. That’s the class everything else rests on.

If you’re a parent or a grandparent, next time you ask a kid, “Where are you going to college?” add three more questions:
“What do you want to build?”
“What do you want to fix?”
“What do you want to keep running when it matters?”

And if you sit in a room where budgets are made, remember this: apprenticeships aren’t charity, they’re national defense. Every bridge that stands, every home that stays warm, every light that comes back on after the storm is a vote for the trades whether you filled the bubble or not.

A few days ago, I was at the grocery store in my old IBEW jacket when a man in a suit nodded at me. “You guys kept my mother’s place powered during that ice storm,” he said. “We never met, but thank you.”

We shook hands. His was soft. Mine was not. Neither was better. Both were necessary.

When the city went dark, I climbed. I’ll climb again if I have to. Because at the end of the day—and the end of the line—this country still needs people who keep the lights on, in every sense of the word.