Some day I would like to meet up in a bar somewhere with the clever person who invented the paving stone. I would really like the opportunity to fill that individual in on a few of the shortcomings of this invention. Because I can’t think of one other solid object, manufactured over the past 15 years, that has caused me as much misery as that small, red “cobblestone” block that now numbers in the thousands around my property.
The paving stone is to the perfectionist homeowner what crack cocaine is to the junkie; neither one can just leave the darned stuff alone. This accounts for the fact that over the last decade and a half, I have covered up almost every square inch of my city property with those blasted little “pavers”. This would be fine, I suppose, if my property was the site of a shopping mall, welcoming hundreds of visitors every day, but it isn’t. Sitting on my lot is a little blue house, built to keep my family and I and our TVs out of the cold and the heat. And that’s what it does. In the winter we stay inside because we have a furnace; in the summer we stay inside because we have an air conditioner. Basically, we have no need for our outside. We leave that for the bugs, the weeds, the neighbourhood litterers and the community dogs who need a place to do their doo which their owners leave on our lawn. Still, as king of this little domain, this has always been my dilemma: If my home is my castle, shouldn’t it look like a castle? And don’t castles have cobblestones?
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It started with a glossy brochure. Most homeowner problems do. There, in full-colour photo after photo, were displayed the most beautiful dwellings this side of the Riviera, all of them with glistening new driveways, walkways and patios constructed lovingly of concrete paving stones. How better to give our little shack some instant respectability than to surround it with stones?
From pretty pamphlet to a front lawn covered with wooden skids filled with paving stones seemed to take no time at all. It would take considerably longer to get these hundreds of heavy red rectangles down into the beds of gravel and sand it took me weeks of hard slugging to prepare for them.
Paving stones are promoted as a do-it-yourselfer’s dream come true but this is not the case. The brochures don’t bother to mention that to set several hundred of these rough-hewn bricks in place, even using the simplest of patterns, requires the skilled hands of a heart surgeon. One little error over here grows to be a crack two inches wide over there and soon, you are tearing up the whole patch to start over again.
Truthfully, there either needs to be a law banning the laying of paving stones by anyone but the professional paver or a 24-hour clinic where the harried homeowner, intent on denying the paver his fee, can go for help. The frustration involved would have a pastor talking like a pirate faster than you can say … well, on second thought, you can’t say that here.
Slowly, the job is accomplished and for about one day, your newly paved piece of paradise has some brochure-like qualities, if you take off your glasses and blur your eyes while looking at it. Then the first rain falls, and you are rewarded. Everything glistens like a bachelor’s teeth on his wedding day and you wonder at the extent of your good fortune. Passersby stop to admire your work. You admire your work. And yourself for being so clever to have thought of it.
However, also admiring your accomplishment at that moment are the five million ants which have spent the past few days preparing to leave the surrounding 10 properties and to move to your place. It’s hard for them to say goodbye to the other homes where they’ve been for so many years, but never has such a wonderland for their species opened so near to them and they have no choice but to go. Moving day over, they spend the next 15 years constructing elaborate colonies in the sand and gravel below the pavers, and like the miners that they are, have to find someplace for the fill they remove to create their own miniature castles. So, they send that up little elevators to the surface and deposit it in great mounds which soon start to appear everywhere like mini-dunes on a windswept beach. After years of sweeping up these incredibly huge piles of ant debris, you wonder how much can possibly be left under there and whether or not someday the driveway, patio and sidewalks will simply collapse and fall, for lack of support, into the centre of the earth.
But then you realize that what might be keeping the stones from falling is the two tons of moss that have sewn their way, like threads in a patchwork quilt, across the elaborate network that has become your yard. Whatever you once felt about ants and moss, you eventually come to despise them both and their quiet way of creeping into your life. But they will soon be joined by a third partner in this enterprise as your lawn eventually realizes there is no real need to stop its activities just because a few bricks have been strewn about. And so, in the manner of the moss, it too begins to move over the paving stones like new hair on a baby’s bald head, leaving room for the odd weed, and in time, you have before you, something truly breathtaking. Despite all your work and worry, your paved-over property eventually takes on the appearance of a place which has not seen human habitation for at least 50 years.
But none of these problems are the bad part.
This is the bad part.
If your concrete or asphalt pavement broke up over time, which it would, you’d call somebody in to replace it. And somebody would. But the big selling point for paving stones is that, hey! If they start giving you trouble, you can just take them up and re-lay them.
So, you do.
Every year, another section comes up, more sand for the ants is put down, and more skin disappears from your fingers and knees as you carefully set the craggly brick dominoes in their place again. In the process of doing this, you see other patches of ground that could benefit from a covering of stone and soon, another skid of bricks is on its way to your place from the pave-stone pusher you call when in need of another fix.
And if that’s the bad part, here’s the sad part.
Now and then, you take a break from paving, sweeping up sand, digging out moss and pulling out grass, to throw a wee backyard party. The guests all arrive and as if by prior agreement, all pick up their lawnchairs and move them off the paving stones onto the lawn. Something about the feel of cool grass between their toes attracts them. Soon, the cobbled corner of your yard is empty and lonely, much like you are yourself.
For people as deranged as you have become by your need to pave, there is only one answer. A dramatic solution, admittedly, but probably your only hope. You need to get to A.A.
An Apartment, that is.
©2004 Jim Hagarty
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