The Cee-ment Pond, part 2.. the saga continues..

The Cee-ment Pond, part 2.. the saga continues..

Sunday dawned cool and beautiful. Linda had scheduled the concrete guy to come and bring a truck load for us to ‘shoot’ around the outside of the pool walls. The other renter, Ron, had his concrete shooter hooked to his truck in the front yard.

I quietly peeked my head out of my room and there was dead silence. Whew.. maybe they forgot I was here. Previously on Hill Street Blues.. wait, wrong show.. Previously on Wood Street Blues.. ah, we’re back!.. there were supposed to be a couple of guys come over to help ‘shoot the crete’ around the outside of the pool walls: Chris (who’s name has been changed to protect .. something, but then I couldn’t think of a cool name to call him so his name will remain as his real one), called at 7, saying he was sick and couldn’t make it, which meant that when we needed him, and he was texting his woman, he’d have to finish the text-ing before engaging in the ‘shooting of the crete’ and he’d rather text than shoot… .

The other guy, I forget his name, who had such health problems that he was on two morphine patches and would pass out as you were in conversation with him (he was also the one who ran the little front end loader the very first day and kept tipping it over and having to crawl out and drag the back end back down ~ very strong, but not really continuously coherent ~ and drive the load of sand around to the next pile.. ), called off because his wife wasn’t feeling well. Guess if one gets her time of the month at that household, the whole family does.. go figure.

Anyway, I was in charge of holding the little extension cord with the on/off switch to the concrete shooing.. thing.. (“Hey, this is easy!”). Ron, the shooter, walked the big hose from the far corner, down the side toward me and around the end where the steps are and around that corner and half way down, and ran out of hose.

“Sorry, ladies, we’re going to have to take the hose back around the front of the house and come in from the other way.” Uh-oh.. hhmmm the ‘we’ word .. it’s cool, I can do this! So, I laid the little light-weight switch on the end of a really light weight extension cord and said, full of bravado and cchhhhutzpa.. both of which were as false as a silk plant in a patch of fresh flowers.. said, “I’m here for ya, man!”

Lying bravely and trying to bend over in the stupid shorts I’d picked to wear for the day, I pulled up the legs, bent over to pick up this heavy-ass hose (that was, on top of everything else, really dirty). Here I am, hitching up the legs of my shorts, bending over, reaching for the hose to haul, and the hose just ‘skippidy do dah day’d’ beyond my reach.

Did you ever see those funny videos of someone torturing a little kid (and usually winning $10,000 because of it) by dragging something in front of him and making him reach down, run a few steps, reach down and run a few more, never catching what was being pulled ahead of him, but too ignorant to figure out how to actually catch it? We all laughed our butts off, right? Well, it’s not so funny when you’re the older ‘little kid’ who was trying to catch that danged hose, trying to help and not look like a doof.

Finally, I decided to run ahead of the hose and jump into the loop and bend over (again, reaching down to pull up my shorts legs) and grab it as it came to me and catch it up and jog right on behind the guy who had it over his shoulder and was jogging around the house. That would have been really cool if it had actually worked out like that, wouldn’t it? Sad to say, it came rushing at me, ran up over the tops of my bare, thronged feet and darned near threw me down, face first into the driveway. OW. The driveway is a very unforgiving strip of asphalt, but luckily I caught myself in time and didn’t get hurt too badly.. either physically or for the amusement of others.

Did you know that on Sundays, the whole neighborhood is in motion? Jogging, walking dogs, driving slowly by and gawking, coming out of homes to see what’s going on in their neighbor’s homes.. (we even had one nosey nimrod that actually said, “I’m from three streets over and want to know if this will concern me in any way? What are you doing and do you have permission to do any of this?”)

After we all looked at him in surprise, (I had visions of going over, scooping up a shovel full of wet cement and asking him to hold it in his lap.. but luckily for me and the fact that going to court and doing actual jail time sort of scares the hell out of me, the moment passed.. what a drive-by butthead, though..) he was smartly dispatched by us turning around and ignoring him. He finally drove away (probably because he didn’t want to walk all the way up to the door where the permits are taped or getting accidentally hit in the back of the head with my shovel and ending up as part of the cement collar holding the pool together.. call me Guido.)

But I digress.. I was able to actually get hold of the hose when it suddenly stopped. I picked it up (and mentally went ‘eeaauww’ when I saw how dirty it was) and started hauling my end up to where Ron was standing. I fleetingly noticed Linda bent over by the side of the house.. it didn’t enter my head or penetrate skin until I sort of jogged up to her, about 10 feet with that hose cradled against my chest and I was sort of jogging-staggering toward her that she was saying in a breathy tone that she was maybe having a heart attack. That bad boy was heavy as hell! But she straightened up, looked a bit vacant and then came back around.

What we’d forgotten about was not only was the hose itself weighy, but it was also full of un-shot concrete. Double Duh and a half! Sheesh! What I also didn’t realize until I went into the same zone that Linda was, thinking she was having a heart attack. At this point, I was only seeing those dark spots before my eyes and I was distracted from being totally alarmed by the fact that they were now turning into bright, iridescent, cool-looking shapes and zooming off like a fire works show.

The toss up was, A) enjoy the show or B) get a bit tense because my heart was trying to burst out of my shirt. I decided, screw it, enjoy the show and hope that I am able to catch my breath again before the day was out. But then I saw a bright light and my mom, who’d passed in ’85, was waving at me. “Mom? I’m comin, Ma!” WAIT! I have work to do here! So the bright white light faded and I waved a fond adieu to her. Sigh. Back to work..

We finally got the hose relocated to the other side of the house and around to the back. I think what made it more frustrating was that the guy who brought the truck load of cement was sitting on the side of his truck smoking a cigarette and watching the entertainment of two women about ready to walk into the light and see God (and my Mom). Butthead.

Moments later, in reality, but it seemed as if time stopped for about an hour and a half, Linda was in the back w the hose, waiting to shoot the rest of the concrete around the pool, but the mix was so crappy that it all separated and Ron had to climb into the hopper and shovel it all out onto the lawn to un-jam what was stuck in the thingy that the hose hooked into. So, he was scooping it all out onto the lawn. Something about that didn’t seem right, but I was trying to stuff my bulging eyeballs back into my face and not have my head explode from recovering from toting that hose full of cement.

I later realized that we’d have to remove the cement from the drainage ditch or during the rainy season, the rest of the neighbors and the housing association were going to get very cranky and it would probably spawn some hefty fines for Linda or at least some severe and very annoying whining from someone driving past and putting in their two cents for no reason at all. (We’d just witnessed that happenstance, and were not willing to deal with it again, on any level)

What was TOTALLY lucky for me, was that I’d planned to go to Dinner Theatre matinee with a couple of lady friends of mine and my parole was about to come up sooner than later! Ahhh.. life is good!!!

So, in my benevolence, I decided to go ahead and shovel up the mess in the ditch, toss it into the wheelbarrow that Linda had brought down and thus, started scooping and tossing into the waiting bucket. Suddenly, the darn thing tipped over. I’d shoveled too much, too much faster than Linda was filling her side and over it went. I scrambled up the little incline, my thongs sticking and my walking out of them to help get the barrow back upright. Easier said than done.. we were lifting heavy stuff again. After much mental swearing (ok, maybe there WERE a few discouraging words being heard, but the sky was not cloudy all day!), we got the thing set up again for the load.

Once loaded, Linda decided to just pick it up and run it on back to the back yard. In theory and desire, she was there. Regarding the muscle and the back up and push it would take to get it there, it lacked something.. mainly, the muscle and back up and push. So, again, I scrambled up the little incline, again losing my flops and after stopping and retrieving them, Ron had gently moved Linda out of the way by saying, “Look out, I’ve got it.” And leaving both of us in the dust (which was my plan altogether, which had worked for me for years as a kid avoiding helping mom w the dishes in the evenings by claiming nature calls to the bathroom. Little did she know that in that length of time I’d been able to read the entire 45 volumes of the encyclopedia set we’d bought and were in the handy-dandy wall off books JUST outside the bathroom door in our house in Iowa. Good goin’, dad! My favorite tome was the one that said ‘Banf to Boxing’ and the one w the cellophane body in it where you turn the pages and it layers to go from skin to bones and back again.. NEAT-O!).

At that point, the helpful concrete driver had accosted Linda for his money, and while they were counting out the bux, I took the hose and completely, to the best of my ability started washing down Ron’s bit yellow concrete shooting appendage on the back of his truck. This not only helped my heart-rate get back to acceptable beat-age, but bought me time looking like I was doing something before I could escape for my dinner theatre date. Stupidly, I finished and asked what else was needed before I got ready to go. Luckily, I only had to roll up the water hose and be on my way to getting ready.

That was Sunday. Monday, the concrete hardened. Tuesday, I came home from work and decided to fill in under the pool stairs with sand, so people could just walk across a little bridge from the ‘mainland’ to the pool and climb down to do the finish work in the center itself.

So, I went right out after work, picked up a shovel and went off in my mind with many thoughts while I shoveled like an automaton. Ten minutes later, I was suddenly brought back to the real world by the black dots. Whew! I stopped and looked at my progress and my right arm was a bit tender. Time to change arms. (this is my ‘work my body evenly so that on one side I don’t look like Ahh-nold and on the other side have the muscle and attraction of a stewing chicken’ mind-set ~ usually it happens that I don’t work either side, so I’m evenly soggy on both sides.. works for me!)

I shoveled again, getting lost in my thoughts, was brought back by the black dots. Stopped and calmed, thought and breathed. Then I needed to climb down and get the sand totally under the steps and packed down. So, I did that, got lost in thought and didn’t come back till beyond the black dots and was going into the iridescent fireworks. Hanging onto the handle of the shovel, I sat on the side of the sand wall where I’d been shoveling. The white light opened up and my mom was there, not looking pleased.

In my mind, she was telling me, “Look, I’ve got stuff to do up here, I can’t be just running to the light to see what you’re up to, we’re not ready for you yet, your room’s not finished yet. OY! Get yourself back in there, stop digging and leave me alone! I love you, will see you someday, now Go Away!” Taking that to heart (once I caught it and returned it to my chest, while questioning who my mom has been hanging out with to come up with the ‘oy!’ thing, I decided that I could wait for another time to go see my big lavender room in the sky, I dragged myself out of the hole, leaned the shovel up against the wall and went in to clean up and find something to eat.

The saga will continue, but maybe not with my personal participation in it.. I’ll just keep taking pictures from afar..

Bekki Shanklin, copyright 2006, from her “Thinking All The Time” series