Falling for a brick

The quarantine is playing games with my head. How else can I account for my growing attachment to a brick?  More to the point, why would I admit this in public? And post it in a blog?

It’s possible that my attraction has been driven by the tensions generated by staying at home with my husband. I love him dearly, but I’m pretty sure that if, as newlyweds, we’d spent every day and every night in weeks or months of enforced intimacy, with no end in sight, our marriage would not have endured for the forty years it has. It just would have felt that way. I’m tempted. It seems that we all are.

The liquor cabinet, the pantry, and Netflix appear to be the choices of much of the country. Facebook feeds me endless photos of puppies doing the things that all puppies do, the contrails planes leave in the sky, and before-and-after images of pale gray walls completely transformed by a coat of slightly darker gray paint. So why not a brick? Especially if the brick is a Purington Paver. 

I have done enough research to write, if not a book, then a term paper worthy of an A. Or a sonnet. Not a sestina, however: Elizabeth Bishop claimed the form with her poem, “Sestina.” (Look it up. In it, an almanac speaks, a grandmother sings to her stove, and a child sits at the table, drawing house after house after house. Doesn’t that sound like a quarantine?) I’m sorry. You’ll have to settle for prose.  

More than a century ago, at the Purington brickyards in Galesburg, Illinois, my brick was molded, fired in a coal-powered kiln until it hardened and vitrified, turning the original muddy compound into a Purington Paver. It measured 9”x 4”x 3.5”, weighed ten pounds, and was hard enough to endure just about anything the automobile age and the forces of nature could throw at it. And endure it did. Purington bricks paved streets from the factory’s hometown to Bombay, to Panama City to Paris. Most cities in the Midwest relied on the Purington factory. My hometown of St. Paul, Minnesota, was one of them. 

Thirty years ago, the St. Paul public works department tore up a section of Marshall Avenue, three blocks from our house. Under the asphalt surface were Purington Pavers. Most were in perfect condition. We’d recently moved to the neighborhood. With two small children and one income, all of our projects had to be DIY. Mindful of the suspension of our Dodge minivan, my husband made a dozen trips, bringing home nearly four hundred Purington Pavers. Two tons of history would landscape our yard. 

We laid the pavers lovingly. They separated the lawn from the flower beds. They encircled our pond, our azaleas, dogwood and lilacs. Along the side of the house, I made a two-foot-wide path. We salted and shoveled it in winter. Weeds pushed through in summer. Grass crept, burying it in the places where had settled. Eventually, our lawn reclaimed it. We needed a new sidewalk.

Now that I’ve revealed my passion for bricks, I may as well admit my admiration for cement mixers.

Unlike graders and dump trucks, these turning barrels have a unique urgency. Once they start up, they can’t stop. Think about it. If you underestimate the size and scope of a project, you’re in trouble. The concrete will seize up. You can’t just start up a new batch. Just as in a bakery, you get one chance: Proof the yeast and make the sponge; set the dough in a warm place to rise; knead, shape, and bake it. If you take the day’s loaves out of the oven at, say, four in the afternoon, you will be out of business. Not even your best customers will return. Your parents will disown you. Your children will get off the school bus blocks from your house, so as not to be recognized as the offspring of you, the disgraced baker. It’s the same way with cement.

A crew of seven guys arrived at 8:15 a.m. They pried out the cracked and broken slabs, lopsided from frost heave, that extended from our steps to the boulevard. By nine a.m., our front sidewalk was a pile of rubble. By nine-thirty, the soil was level and the borders set. And it wasn’t just the front; our bleak back yard needed new concrete as well. And my beloved path had to go.

“Can you save the bricks?” I asked one of the guys. Implored, maybe. Begged. “Some history in them.” 

“Sure,” he said. “Mind if I keep a couple? These would make great bookends.”

“Absolutely. Take more.” I didn’t want to part with more. But the new sidewalk was turning out much better than I had expected. The front of the house, the side, the back. Curving around the pond and patio, dividing into a graceful wishbone to the garage. It was beautiful. But I had new projects in mind.

 “Nah. They’re heavy suckers.” He paused. “You know, you could sell these on eBay. I’ve seen these Purington Pavers going for ten bucks apiece. Or twenty. People want them because they last forever. You could make a fortune.”

“You’re kidding.” I was tempted. But I had more projects in mind. “You’re right. They are durable.” 

My brick, along with stacks of identical ones, had been once more reclaimed. They’d lasted through ninety years of traffic along Marshall Avenue, and another thirty years of neglect along the side of my house. Now that’s durable.

 I warned you that my story was prosaic.  But it ends with a prayer: May we all emerge from this ordeal unbroken.