I’m building a pool. Right now, as we speak, there’s a big cement truck in front of my house and a four-hundred-pound man in my backyard firing cement through a high-pressure hose. He’s like a Mexican Pavarotti, singing a concrete aria. You should have seen him while they were setting up, sitting on my back stoop with an orange juice and a bag full of tamales. Adjusting his nozzle like a big-league slugger pine-tarring his bat before he steps up to the plate. He was ready for battle, and now he’s out there crude and rude, blasting away, shooting a thick stream of lumpy jizz. Luckily, he has a couple of side men, elegant types with trowels to smooth over his rough edges. He shoots from the hip, creating the walls of my future, his trowelers moving in with their giant spatulas, like they’re frosting a concrete cake.
What the hell is happening? How did I become someone who builds a pool?! Fifteen years ago, I was dead on a table, sawed in half; done for, finished, swallowed by the whale. How can that guy be the same as the one who now has a team of men transforming his backyard into paradise? How did I go from casualty to pool owner, and now that I am, can I even deal with it? Can I be that upright a citizen? Can I live with the idea of my son saying to a friend, "let’s go over to my dad’s house and swim" and when they show up, I answer the door? What does it mean? Do I have to retire my fiercely curated bad boy with a tender soul persona or can I just roll with it and be a poet with a pool?
I want to go on a big rant, how it’s too painful for me to be that much of a grown-up, but it’s not true. In fact, it’s a big fat fucking joy! You know you have become a serious adult when you have a porta potty in your backyard and it’s not for you.
Last week I watched them dig the hole and it was incredible. Just two guys with one of those “Bobcat” loader/digger/bulldozer things. Forty feet long and eight feet wide, they cut a clean brown scar into the cheek of my backyard. The only word I can use to describe it is sexy! The goal of course was a pool, but part of me just wanted to leave it as an archeological dig sight or joy bunker. An outdoor root cellar to sleep in and have cabbage dreams.
As I watched them, I was overwhelmed by the truth of excavation. They were changing the shape of the earth, transforming the world at an hourly wage. I watched them work and wished I could write with the same detached purpose. All action and free from self-judgement, what they accomplished with dirt in hours would have taken me years in words.
It’s almost noon now and Pavarotti has taken his final bow. The pool will never be more beautiful than it is now, the walls smoothed but raw and unfinished. The gray permanence and ancient honeycomb of freshly poured concrete. It is more an art installation than a swimming pool and some Michael Heizer type would take a hundred times longer, and finish with something far less beautiful (something far less beautiful you couldn’t swim in). These guys are the real earth moving artists, but because it’s not “art” or monetized in some jive-ass subjective way, we call it labor. But it is art, and I have had the honor of being in the presence of masters.
The line between art and craft is frequently blurred… I’m a construction project manager see it crossed on a regular basis by workers that are rarely acknowledged or appreciated for having artistry in their souls. It’s all over the place, if you look for it! Thanks for noticing!
That is impressive. I would vote for the guy who is building your pool as Speaker Of the House in a heart beat.