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…
