The Tommyknocker Rock

There’s a been a bald patch in the back yard since we moved into Jasperwood, and there’s a good reason nothing grows there: a 12-inch divot of rock. Or stone. The distinction, if ever, escapes me. Over the years I’ve come to appreciate the stone; it’s the spot where I put the fireworks every Fourth. There’s something ancient about it, too – who knows what glacier pushed it to this place, then melted away like a parent tiptoeing out of a room in which an infant has finally fallen asleep.

“Could you dig up that rock?” my wife asked. This was, after all, The Weekend of Stone. (Or rock.) The Giant Swede was coming by on Sunday morning to help reassemble the flat stone slabs removed for the ruinously expensive drain project. They’ve sat in a heap since last December. The snows went. The boards beneath the stones killed the grass and the shrubs. The depression formed by the excavation looked like a grave over a cheap coffin that collapsed after a year. I’d put the retaining wall back, poured in 20 bags of dirt, but needed help with the slabs. So the Swede comes over, and we pick up the biggest one, and I get about six inches off the ground before I realize that A) this isn’t going to work at all, and B) I’d better get my hand out from beneath it before it drops, pinning my finger between the slab and another one, and C) too late for B. Ouch. Blood. Run inside, bandage it up.

Took an hour or so, but we got them all in. The biggest one we had to walk, “like the statues on Easter Island,” as the Giant Swede put it. Move it a little this way, then that way. I imagined doing that with one enormous statue after the other; what a pointless endeavor.

“They didn’t have much else to do,” he noted.

After the slabs were in place I chopped up the dead shrubs and raked it up and put the big wooden boards over the stones, and gazed upon the work and pronounced it Good. And I felt a great sense of relief: the pile of stone had felt like a metaphor for things ruined and unfixed, and now I could go on with life. Didn’t have to avoid looking at that side of the house any more. Done!

“Could you dig up that rock?” my wife said again. So I got out the spade and started working.

Preliminary excavation suggests it is quite enormous. Oh, it sloped away . . . eventually. But I could just imagine the tip of a boulder the size of a hot-air balloon under the lawn, and after getting confirmation from the Swede that this was a job of immense expense – they’d have to bring a truck up the hill, take out the fence, blast and hammer – I shoveled the dirt back over it.

Done!

After cleaning up I went to the mall to buy some new glasses. Because I hate my old glasses. They were the black-rimmed type that’s popular these days, black on top with black sides, and while they look cool I thought they just made me look old. I looked like my grandfather. When I got a coupon from Lenscrafters for really, really inexpensive glasses I thought: do it. Not an impulse purchase, usually, but sometimes you have to capitalize on your initiative. The biggest problem with getting glasses is that you need your old glasses to see yourself in the new ones. You really can’t tell much, except that your eyebrows need trimming: I had one that almost resembled the feeler of an insect.

Fitting took just a few minutes. They gave me a device to wear on my glasses that nailed down the lines where one correction eased into another, and the device looked like someone should be sitting next to me putting in eyedrops while I slooshied the horrible scenes of tolchocking old devotchkas and such, O my brothers. When I was told to come back in an hour, I was almost annoyed: I’d rather come back tomorrow. Now I have to hang around the Mall for an hour. Can’t go to the Apple store, because I have what I need. Well, good thing the mother Mall, Southdale, the nation’s first, is stocked with retail opportunities!

That one’s particularly sad; suggests the mall isn’t exactly pulling in the high-profile upscale chains. Don’t mean to blame the management, but when I see ad slogans like this on an kiosk I suspect they may not have their finger on the throbbing pulse of the vernacular:

Criminey. I mean. Really. Did someone present an ad that said “Optimizing Stakeholder Value,” and someone said “whoa, hold on, that’s way too street. Class it up a little.” Think of the number of people who signed off on “Clearly Impactful.” Think of the few people who worked on the project who had no idea what it meant, but it wasn’t their place to say. Think of the one person who bit the side of his or her cheek because the boss liked it, but it was just the sort of meaningless corporate speak that everyone makes fun of on the internet. No doubt the same person who wrote the line is also in charge of Maximizing Social Media Strategies, too, perhaps by leveraging the company’s cross platform synergies.

In other words: The recession hit this place like Casey Affleck in “The Killer Inside Me.” (Saw it this weekend, because I’m a longstanding Jim Thompson fan, and was told this was the most Thompsonesque adaptation ever. That it might be. Not for the faint. Affleck is tremendous.) The center of the mall is still full, and the long-vacant Mervyn’s store will be filled by a new department store anchor, so there’s hope. I just wilt when I see all the shuttered stores, though. Yankee Candle pulled up stakes a while ago. Nice store. Loved to go there with my daughter and smell things. (Bought stuff too, so we weren’t just scent-leeches.)

I wandered over to Eddie Bauer, because my backpack finally popped a strap on the last trip. I wanted something small that did not have 46 straps. This is not possible, it seems. Every bag had 46 straps. Not sure all were functional. Even if they were, I’ve never been in a situation where I thought “this bag lacks the means to be cinched tighter, thereby compacting and crushing its contents.” The bags also had 132 compartments. I have a small Eddie Bauer bag I use for day trips, and it drives me insane: it has eight compartments. Every time I want to get something out of it I have to paw through at least four. There was a small backpack – a sling bag, really – on sale for $14. It has three compartments. Snapped it up.

Would have been nice if it had four, but you can’t have everything.

While I’m cleaning stuff off the iPhone, some other peculiar things I’ve snapped recently. Note the fine print: hand-crafted artisanal legalese for discerning idiots:

But no warning about the gravity-intensifying power of celery. LAWSUIT.

It’s come to this: a new level of explicitness in feline hygiene products.

And finally: sigh.

Must we? Really, must we?

Big week ahead; the Fair is here, and I’m there every day shooting video. Bigger day for chilld on Monday: school starts. She’s excited. It’s Middle School. When I was a wee bairn you went to Junior High, and it began with 7th grade. Now it’s Middle, and starts with 6th. We toured the school on Friday after I picked her up from camp – a bit of whiplash, going from the northwoods to the ceramic-tiled hallways of a Kennedy-era school. Met many teachers.

I have been instructed not to walk to the bus stop; that goes without saying. I have also been informed she can make her own lunches now, which is great! Responsibility and initiative, and all those growin’-up things! Hate it. All the things you do fall away – one year you meet the bus, then you stand by the window and watch for it, then you note the clock to remind you it’s due, then you’re off shopping because she can let herself in. It takes the first day of school to remind you that your child’s soles are greased with mercury. Or, to put it another way: You hear the flap of another sail unfurled, catching the wind, hastening the voyage. There was a time you were at the wheel. You realize you’re in a boat in the ship’s wake.

Row as hard as you can.