Crumbling Walls

The sun is slow to rise this morning, yawning as it stretches and twists and turns to loosen itself up for another full day, the morning clouds wispy and sparse, drops of dew collected on blades of grass keep the lawns cool and wet to the touch.  The birds are still early morning active – not having sat down for their ritual rest yet – the red squirrels dance in the branches overhead, the trees finally greening up nicely.

It’s a perfect late spring morning, I’m up early to take advantage of what is presented each day but missed in favor of the blankets and pillows: the quiet solitude of the back yard, a city yet to emerge from its restful slumber, the beginnings of another day.  In the distances a car engine starts and a fan belt squeals until it finds its rhythm, an early riser off to work, about to join an ever-increasing morning rush.  The paper has already been dissected and parsed, a cup of coffee keeps me company, and I wonder what the day will hold.

The remainder of the 3 yards of topsoil sits waiting under a blue tarp on the driveway – half of the original delivery has been shoveled and spread, raked and rolled, seeded and watered – the front yard once again resembling itself, though it sits reduced in size somewhat because of the relocated driveway. I finally had the last of the stone blocks removed this week, they sat there at the curb all winter, waiting to be salvaged and repurposed, but no takers could be found, and Monday they met their next fate and were loaded into a trailer and hauled off to be dumped as fill. 

Quarried fifty some years ago they adorned our home’s façade until last fall, when I chiseled and hammered them loose and carted them away from the site and neatly arranged them in squareish piles by the new driveway.  Our new plans call for a different direction in exterior finishes, perhaps a cultured man-made stone in places, and with that the old stone with its fractures and fossils became obsolete.

As I raked and leveled the ground where the stones had been stacked I thought about the choices we make on a regular basis, design and décor choices, purchasing habits and tastes, updates and redo’s.  We are an ever-changing people wanting ever-current surroundings, with the latest technology, the newest model of car, the trending social media stories, and the next big app.  We wonder about our children’s ability to read and write with any fluency given their seemingly innate abilities on tiny touch screens and miniscule keypads, banging out 140 character updates to an increasingly self-obsessed society of online friends, words mangled into cryptic shortcuts for those pressed for time and attention.

The local school board complains the grade 8 math scores are lower than low, the board members and Education Minister moan and wail about decreased ability and functional cognition of basic facts, afraid we’re turning out graduates who can’t balance their cheque-books – if those still exist. But it seems the real objective is not to be better for the sake of the students so much as to not be behind the pack of peers tested. Even at that level the concern is about the comparison to others, not the comparison to self.  Where do we rank? Instead of Are they learning the skills they require?

To my untrained eye it seems we’ve grown as a society into something we didn’t wish to be. 40 is the new 20, and we’re being led by business and governments with no perspective and less maturity than ever before.  Facebook’s IPO is set to launch this morning to the tune of $18 Billion. Not bad for a company formed only a few years ago by a college kid looking to more easily hook-up, doubtful he was concerned about grade 8 math scores or gave any thought as to how his creation would serve society.   But there they are this morning, the media story of the day, people turning over fortunes to them to buy a piece of the action, another 3 card Monte, pulled off in a boardroom and not on a street corner.

Maybe I’m just getting older and more cynical of a world I still don’t understand.  I’m not sure.  As I leaned on my rake and chatted with my elder neighbor from across the street, I asked him if he was staying out of trouble but I already knew the answer – he was far too busy to be in any trouble, bowling and soccer and curling and more social engagements than you would have thought possible to cram into a weekly schedule.  He didn’t need a computer to connect with his world, he was too busy being a part of it.  He congratulated me on the addition and said he was impressed how well it fit in to the existing look and feel of the street; I thanked him for the compliment and went back to the raking.

I looked once more at the house and thought about the new stonework we would be putting up – man-made to look like the real thing, but lighter and less expensive, with no long-term knowledge of how well it will serve its purpose.  And then I wondered about the Facebook IPO and those math scores and texting and Twitter.  Maybe a return to real stone is the right choice for my future…