I signed on with my summer employer to work in the office, but I also fill in when he needs a substitute hand in the field. If you can imagine a bloke togged in semi-dress slacks, shined Florsheims and a shirt that would not look out of place at Magna Bank attached to a guy with a clean-shaven face working with stone artisans in knee-length denim, Adidas and tee shirts as we put finishing touches on a new home in a place I call Richburb, you begin to appreciate the nutty discontinuity of the scene.
Richburb is a place most of the owners of these new-build homes will never see at !:30 on a Friday afternoon because they’re busy at the office, or in the courtroom or hospital. If you think driving down a typical Central City neighborhood avenue with an occasional car sharing curbs with plumbers; oickups; aopliance store delivery trucks and locksmiths’ vans is a mite cluttery, you sould see Richburb Place on Friday afternoon. Along a new street probably paved five years ago, probably 1/3 of the homes are completed and a like number of homes are being finished, and the rest of the lots reveal homes where construction has apparently stopped (maybe the banks forecolsed) or where the empty lots are untouched except for a few ruts in grass blazed by heavy equipment. Where construction is underway, the street curbs are a circus wagon panoply of colorful trucks and business logos of companies you would recognize from the Yellow Pages. Every vehicle is spotless. This is Richburb Place; not Central City. None of them park in driveways. If there’s wind, one sees clay dust blowing into neighbors’ yards like smoke from a smouldering brush fire. My business in this place is to assist two twenty-something gentlemen install natural stone in a “house away from the house.” The home and pool, completed this spring, overlook an extensively tiled, expansive patio which is “capped” at the far end by a structure that will function as a kitchen and bathroom/shower facility for entertaining family and guests starting in early July. When you see how far the house is from the patio and the steps leading to the entrance — about as many as the steps leading to the entrance to the Michael J. Howlett Building entrance from Second Street just south of the Capitol — you understand why this second structure was a necessary adjunct to the elegant tableau.
Installing natural stone is unhurried, precise effort where industrial-quality dimond-tipped cutting blade on a device that does to granite, marble and onyx what a carpenter’s trusty Black & Decker power saw does to wood. The stone artisan’s tool is a third larger than your workshop’s Dremel Tool. Though the stone has been cut to measurements on larger equipment back at the shop, the construction of several pieces to function as one on a bathroom sink top requires careful trimming. Most large pieces require two to lift them, but carrying primary elements of sink, counter and vanity tops from truck to destination usually requires four and sometimes six men.
On this day, I provided real help with the lifting and collateral tasks, but the real work was done by the others. The surprise came not during the installation but after it. Almost an hour was spent by the company owner, his number-one artisan and babbling blogmeister touching up the stone, removing slight blemishes that might distract the homeowners, touching up dull areas and incidental scratches here and there with a rotating polisher with several grades of wheels (like sandpaper), sealing and polishing it. I was afraid the homeowners were going to retire and move to Florida before we finished, and for the first time since I started working for this gentleman, I was anxious to get home. I hadn’t eaten a bite since last night’s dinner, and that may have been a factor.) Finally we departed, and everyone was happy.
The owner of the home is very “anonymous,” and if I described the scene in any more detail, they’d have to kill me. At any rate, the day was enjoyable for the most part, I had a delicious dinner and finished the Monday Burgundy; later totally enjoyed Charlie Rose’s excellent interview with Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia. I’m looking forward to working when they need me again at the office, and when they need a substitute hand in the field, I will be happy to hit the trail.
Live long . . . . . . and proper.
