He Worked Hod For A Living

"I put a brick in your garden," Dave said.

I wasn't sure what to do with this information, but he appeared to be waiting for a response.

"Did you."

He did. There was an air of expectancy. I looked up. Dave is a brick guy, after all, and has a certain personal aesthetic.

"Well, I'm sure it's in just the right spot."

"You should go look for it. It's hidden," he said. There were a number of things I could have been doing at the moment. I wasn't doing them, but I still wasn't up for finding a brick in a garden spanning two city lots.

"Hidden in plain sight," he wheedled.

We settled for my vowing to keep an eye out for it in the course of my usual wanderings. And sure enough, a week later, I found his brick. In plain sight. It said "HIDDEN." Pretty long wait for a punchline payoff, but hey.

A few months later I found another brick. This one said "E J JEFFERY 1871." It gave me a sense of foreboding. One HIDDEN brick is one thing. You can see the point of that. Two special bricks, and we're getting perilously close to having a collection. I wasn't sure we needed a brick collection. Or if there was such a thing.

My dad used to say that no matter how obscure an item seemed to be, you would discover that there is a whole society devoted to it, with a membership roster, and collections of it all over the world, an associated magazine ("Scurvy Scraper Monthly"), and a thriving exchange market. And he didn't know nothing about no internet.

I looked up E J JEFFERY 1871 and instantly found out Mr. Jeffery owned a brick yard in Portland, Oregon and that he supplied brick for the courthouse and they were all stamped 1872. Not only that, but his brick yard had been located on my old mail route. Not a trace of it remains, but even now a building can be demolished and a new one erected and two weeks later you can't remember what the old one looked like even if you walked by it every day. Could it be Dave's new brick was valuable? That the famous brickmaker who built the courthouse had a rare, earlier model? It didn't take too many more clicks to discover that Dad's observation held true. There are brick collectors.

[shudder]

Now, a brick collection can be a fine thing, if it is assembled into a useful and attractive wall. Dave had accomplished that very thing twenty years ago. It's possible he doesn't get the credit from the neighbors he should have. He spent most of the summer hand-grading the perimeter of the yard, which involved removing obstinate roots, sieving out bucket after bucket of cobble from the old Ice Age Floods, forming and leveling a footing, pouring it in sections as time and the demands of paying work dictated, fashioning forms for arches, removing the footing forms, estimating and ordering block and mortar supplies, setting up work stations and stocking planks, and finally he assembled a crack team of bricklayers and made 5,000 sandwiches and whammo, all in one day 300 feet of wall went up around our yard. "Your friends sure do get a lot done in a hurry," one neighbor observed, and I, being familiar with the man, could see the whole thought process written on his madly blinking face: whereas I dug and scraped and sweated and did all this and hauled all that all summer long and all they had to do was show up, butter some bricks, stick them on top of each other, and drink beer all night, but I believe his actual words were "Yes Ma'am."

Anyway, that's a fine brick collection.

I checked. Dave's bricks aren't valuable and he hasn't accumulated any more of them. We're holding steady at Two. I think we've dodged the collection bullet.

We, personally, are holding steady at 36. Happy Anniversary, Dave!

Me And My Big Tool

Everyone should have a hod carrier to call her very own. What is a hod carrier, you ask? Well, that's what Dave was one of. The way he explains it--and he's perfectly happy to explain it in the presence of bricklayers, who can be thick and scary--you have your bricklayers, and you have your hod carriers. And all your bricklayers do is lay bricks. Your hod carrier is the one that sets up the job, anticipates the needs, gathers the materials, makes the cuts, does the math, brings the rocket ship home, and makes everything work. So the hod carrier is the brain and heart of the operation, and the bricklayer is the meat.

The point is, hod carriers take care of all the little details in your life so that it runs smoothly and everything you need is ready at hand before you even know you need it. If your personal hod carrier is, like mine, particularly good, you can go through life assuming groceries magically appear in your refrigerator and toilets are always clean. The toilet paper replenishes itself, gas tanks are always topped off, the bird feeder is full, and the cat is never hungry.

Even now, after all these years, I have the sorry habit of thinking that if I have everything I need or want, it's just because that's the way life is. I don't always give proper credit. But I do know to come to Dave for special requests. I think of him more as a multi-use all-in-one tool, with nothing missing but the little toothpick.

There's the Extend-A-Dave, with which I retrieve objects from high shelves. It operates wirelessly, triggered by a pointing finger and pitiful whimper.  "Ennh ennh ennh," I say, and point, and the crackers float down to the counter level.

And then there's the Stompinator. The Stompinator has size thirteen shoes and it can compact an overflowing yard debris container into a solid wad a third the previous volume. Yesterday I chopped up a bristly conifer and jammed it in the container. A mass the size of an entire Christmas tree towered above the lip. The Stompinator wadded it up in a minute and pulled four extra conifers in on top of it. There's still room for your softer weeds.

So there you have it: the Stompinator and the Extend-A-Dave, all in one easy tool. But wait! There's more!

One time we spent an entire day yarding out hedges and vines and stickery bushes and shoving them into the pickup truck to take to the dump. Limbs were married together and thorny branches intertwined and the entire tangle of rejected vegetation howled with malice. It was a mess. Nothing, it would appear, would be pulled out easily. Because the situation was insufficiently dire, we also did this on a 95-degree day, which is known to be fatal to Pacific Northwesterners. Dave pulled the truck around to the spot we needed to disgorge our debris. "How are we ever going to get this all out," I whined, plucking impotently at a vine and shouldering my rake in despair, and Dave handed me the rope from the tarp and said "Well, just coil this up for now," and I did. I spent a half minute coiling the rope around my elbow and I stashed it in the cab and then I turned around and our truck was flat empty.

Dave had a plywood sheet in the bottom of the truck and strength not generally required of 21st-century men and he'd gotten himself in the back of the bed, lifted the plywood sheet up, and dumped the entire load in fifteen seconds. He busied himself for another minute sweeping the dust out, shut the tailgate, and climbed behind the wheel.

And that's why he's also called The Big Dump. Happy 34th anniversary, sugar plum, that's the story I plan to stick to.

Heading For A Knockout

Dave got me a pickup load of compost and parked it in front of the house and then he left, which is why we're still married. If he'd stayed home, he would have been unable to prevent himself from being helpful.

What I need to do is prepare portions of my garden a square yard at a time, taking into account what needs dividing and what needs transplanting and what is so invasive that it needs to be given to a neighbor at least three doors down, and then I need to shovel compost one wheelbarrow at a time in the same way the troops deal with the Taliban: clear and hold. It's work, but a lot of the time--as seen from the house--I am motionless. I am squinting. How tall does that thing get again? Is this the yellow thing or the blue thing? Should this be getting more sun? What was I going to put in that spot? Wheels are spinning like crazy in my head, but from the house, I look like the poster child for inefficiency. Dave, on the other hand, is as efficient as Holy Hell.

"Hey, tell you what. Why don't I shovel out the compost and we can knock this thing out in no time!" he says. And it's true. The man is not lazy. He could empty that pickup truck and have the street polished shiny in twenty minutes. The wheelbarrow would follow him back to the shed at heel. Tools in the neighbor's shed would straighten themselves up out of pure respect. He's a machine. He dumps the wheelbarrow and picks it up like it's a five-gallon bucket to shake out the last dribs. He's already got the shovel and returns in a minute with equal parts compost and zeal. "Where do you want it?"

I want it right here, in this tiny little patch, with care taken not to cover those itty bitty leaves of the hardy fuchsia coming up. Don't step there. Don't step there! There's a hosta there. There! Right there!

"I don't see anything."

I know you don't see anything. You have to take my word for it. Get your size thirteens out of there.

Dave whips the wheelbarrow around and returns a few seconds later with another load. "Where do you want it?"

Here's the thing. Listen up. I want it right here where I'm pointing, and then I want to think about things

for a while, and then I want to weed this patch and dig up that perennial and divide it, and in another half hour or so, maybe, I'll want another load. And so on. By the end of the day I will have this little section done, and the truck will still be three-quarters full. Just the way I want it. Instead, we are headed toward a state of mutually assured exasperation. I will feel stampeded, and Dave will feel thwarted.

Dave cannot stand it. He looks at the truck. There's a job, and that means it needs knocking out. He knows that truck could be empty in twenty minutes. It doesn't matter; we don't need it for anything. But it could be empty. All clean. All done. Knocked out. He will grow more and more helpful and agitated and at some point will demand, edgily, to be assigned a clear patch he can dump ALL the compost, and then I can just go ahead and fuck around with it till the cows come home if that's what I really need to do. I try it that way but there's even less of a hurry moving compost that's already on the ground somewhere, and the next spring there will still be a hump of dirt there with really enthusiastic weeds sticking out of it.

It's true we're wired differently, but it's also true that we have both spent over thirty years training for different jobs. Dave was a hod carrier, and I was a letter carrier. When he got to work, stuff needed moving. Brick, block, mortar; it started out here and needed to go there. He and his buddies knocked

out a job. They worked hard. The quicker you could do it, the sooner you could go drink beer. I also started every day with things that needed moving. Letters. But I couldn't take ten trays of random letters and load them in my truck and dump them off somewhere. I had to take each letter individually and poke it into a little hole in a sorting case and then pull it all down again and strap it out and walk it all over the neighborhood and try to get the addresses on the letters to match the house numbers. People were persnickety about that. It was fussy. It wasn't something you knocked out.

Plus, hell. We were proud U.S. letter carriers. We didn't have to finish a job to start drinking beer.