Second-Hand Bricks
I am hunched on the edge of the concrete slab, summer sun scorching my neck and shoulders unrelentingly. I am chiseling, with hammer and file, the mortar off of salvaged bricks. I curse each time a brick breaks under my chisel; that'll be a dock in pay. It's August in Texas; I'm fifteen years old.
It sounds like a scene from a post-apocalyptic, dystopian teen novel, but I'd chosen this brutal prisoner's labor. The concrete slab was our front porch, and the bricks had been reclaimed from the demolition of the front wall of our house. Dad was paying us a quarter a brick to clean off the old mortar so he could reuse them in the addition he was building, but you only got a nickel if the brick cracked in half. Our younger cousin, JulieAnn, had already been fired from brick cleaning for breaking too many.
The addition was designed to give our family extra space now that my sister and I were teenage-sized, with gaggles of teenage-sized friends we brought home to take over our one living room. My parents were tired of being banished to their bedroom. Dad completed the project, with the last coat of peach-colored paint on the walls, in May of 1994 after I'd been off at college for two semesters and my sister, Bonnie, would be out of the house in a few short years -- just in time for my parents to rattle around in a place that was now too big.
Dad honestly didn't care how many bricks we cleaned; he offered the monetary incentive and left us to our own devices. He didn't micromanage us or yell when one of us broke a brick (to our surprise), and he rationally "let JulieAnn go" for her clumsy cleaning, without a note of reproach in his voice. As I remember, Bonnie cleaned more than I did. I was fifteen and eager for the money, but I also had a boyfriend with a car -- places to go, things to...well, places to hang out, anyway.
I didn't think too much about the legacy or metaphor of brick cleaning at the time. My dad put us to the task to save money and also because it would have been difficult to find new bricks to match the original ones. Mostly though, my father hates to waste things. Throwing something out when you can clean it, fix it, reuse it, offends his very nature. In our house, there were flip flops repaired with twine, a washing machine with a weird metal knob replacing the plastic one we kids broke, and a manual-transmission vehicle that started without the clutch engaged. By the time my sister and I were budding teenagers, we took things like chiseling mortar for the sake of frugality as a matter of course. It was weird to our friends but not to us.
Just today, however, I was reading a chapter of Walden, "House Warming," and came across an account of building a chimney with used bricks, and I was excited. Granted, I had to go back hundreds of years to find camaraderie in brick cleaning, but still. Let me use this opportunity to quote Thoreau and seem much more cultured and literary than I am:
I started reading Walden because a novel I was reading -- blasting through fervently, actually, and ignoring everyone in my house - frequently referenced it. I'm not blasting through Walden but reading it more like you would poetry or philosophy - a few pages here, a chapter there, accompanied by a lot of pondering. I have been delighted to discover Thoreau and I are philosophically similar in a lot (but not all) ways. I'm surprised I have that much in common with a nineteenth-century man who never had children and died when he was younger than I am now. But like me, he reveled in nature and simplicity, he was a writer, and apparently, he cleaned bricks.
Thoreau took a much loftier approach to his mortar chiseling than I did, sweating over the quarter per in-tact brick I would get. He would have pitied my working for coins when I could've been toiling to my own ends. In a way, I was, as it was the roof I lived under that my dad was expanding. I, of course, didn't see it that way. I was fifteen. I wasn't helping improve our homestead; I was after money for movies and snacks.
Now, 30 years later, I can more easily see Thoreau's and my dad's view of things -- brick cleaning and otherwise. Because while I was occasionally motivated by the almighty dollar in my youth, the older I get, the less excitement I'm able to muster about a couple of bucks, which is unfortunate because you know, capitalism. Now I prefer to do a lot of things myself instead of hiring someone, who admittedly, might do it better and faster. It's money-saving, but the real reason I cut my own hair is that it's simpler. I don't have to make an appointment or drive anywhere or torture myself and a relative stranger with soul-killing small talk.
This is why I clean my own house (a.k.a, why my house is so fucking dirty); why there's a hole in my bathroom showcasing visible bathtub plumbing that has been there so long I don't see it anymore; why we have inside doorknobs on outside doors replacing the ones the kids broke. There is satisfaction in repairing things ourselves. The downside is, there is always shit waiting to be fixed in our house; the backlog is like, eons. We'll probably fix that gaping hole full of PVC plumbing in the bathroom when we decide to sell the house in ten years. Probably. Because, unlike Thoreau, we can't spend lazy days fishing at the pond and tending a fire for hours to cook our catch. We have kids to take to soccer, a geriatric dog to drag around the block and Everests of laundry to wash and never fold or put away.
But even if, like Thoreau, I could build my own little cabin with second-hand brick chimney upon the idyllic land owned by my financially independent good buddy, Ralph Waldo Emerson, I wouldn't. Thoreau himself said his two-year stint by the pond, second-hand bricks included, wasn't about making a map by which all people should live. He only sought to prove (primarily to himself, I suspect) that it was possible -- if you lived simply -- to work for yourself, to work very little and to be contented for it.
I'm not gonna go live off the grid. I like cell phones, Netflix and having neighbors. But I do seek to make things simpler by cleaning my own metaphorical bricks when I can. When the work is for my own house or my neighbor's and not meaningless labor to make widgets or advertise said widgets for a corporation who will then pay me so I can turn around and pay someone else to fix my toilet, even when it's hard, tedious or maddening, it feels good. So I don't want to buy anything, sell anything or process anything, but maybe I am okay with cleaning bricks, as long as they're metaphorical...me, Lloyd Dobler, my dad and Thoreau. Good company.