They start arriving around 11:45 and by 12:30, there are three, maybe four companies represented:

Roofers, painters, maybe a screen guy.

Or roofers, landscapers, maybe a pest control crew.

In any case, there are usually roofers represented.

In shady and not-so-shady city parks around the island, the working folks of O'ahu have their lunch. Not the downtown silk Tommy Bahama shirt, air-conditioned office, belt matches the shoes working folks. The ones who climb up on roofs, climb up on trees, climb down in pipes. Those working folks. The ones who are out in the elements, the ones who wear stains of their occupation on their clothes and skin, the ones who wear gloves but their hands still get dirty, the ones who don't have an employee lunchroom when they've worked up a good appetite for hamburger cutlet with fried egg.

Sometimes they stretch out on the hood of the truck, head resting on the windshield, dirty boots dangling over the headlights, a look on their face like maybe the heat from the engine feels good on a sore back.

Sometimes they unfold their bodies in the soft grass and sing Bob Marley tunes to the sun winking through the leaves.

They park under monkeypod trees and flick the sticky pods at each other like they're back in fourth grade.

It does feel a bit like lunch recess, when the day of exhausting toil and focus is broken up by a reprieve of starchy chicken, cutting up with friends and a romp in the sour-smelling weeds.

They're usually working on somebody's house, which means they're at the job site all day far away from the company base yard with its lean-to lunch room. They're too grubby or too polite to ask to eat lunch in the homeowner's backyard. They're too grubby or polite to descend on a fast-food restaurant en masse. They're too pressed for time during lunch to drive too far from the neighborhood where their job is at, and besides, they know every park by heart by now. When they first started on the crew, the old-timers took them to lunch at this park. In fact, Benny used to sit right over there and have his extra crispy wings before he retired and moved up Washington.

No one else makes lunch look like such a respite, or makes the No. 7 Combo look so 'ono. Makes you wish you worked as hard so that your lunch was just as good.

Then it is 1:30, sometimes a little earlier, sometimes a little later, and the trucks rumble away, the big water coolers lashed to the truck beds rocking and swaying with the parking lot speed bumps.

Lee Cataluna's column runs Tuesdays, Fridays and Sundays. Reach her at 535-8172 or lcataluna@honoluluadvertiser.com.