Express Paving

 My job has me doing all sorts of things.  Today at work, I did a walkaround with a paving contractor.  I led him around various areas of the parking lots and shipping areas of my worksite so that he could get us a quote for filling in potholes, seal-coating, and all that.  Listening to him talk about what needed to be done took me back to the days of my early childhood, when I was supposed to be imprinting upon my dad. 

In the 80s my dad owned a company called Express Paving.  He had an office in a building on Elston Avenue, a stone’s throw from our house.  His work truck was a red ‘78 Ford Ranger, with the company logo emblazoned on the doors.  During the spring, summer, and fall, the truck served as the company workhouse, and during the winters, a snowplow was affixed to it.  If the truck wasn’t helping to make parking lots, it was plowing the snow from them.  

For reference, the same view today (as best as I could using Google street view).  Not much seems to have changed in thirty-five years.

The inside of the truck was pretty ratty.  The big bench seat was worn and torn, the dash filthy, and the floor crusty.  It smelled like cigarettes and asphalt.  The bed of the truck was coated in sticky layers of shiny black tar and usually was home to a few loose tools.  Once started, the truck roared like a beast.  From its rusty muffler belched sooty exhaust.  If the truck was equipped with seatbelts, they were never used.  If there was ever a vehicle in which I should have been wearing a seatbelt, it was this one.  The seats were very springy and a bump would momentarily inspire levitation.  One time, my dad was pulled over down a dark road somewhere and the police officer told my dad it was because “the kids are bouncing around without their seatbelts.”  True to form, my dad grabbed the ticket and stuck it with the other eleven thousand pieces of ephemera shoved between the dash and the windshield - a paper purgatory.

My dad was responsible for plowing my school’s parking lot during snowy weather.  He would push all of the snow to the eastern and northern ends of the lot against the chain link fence.  These snow hills were legendary.  Every day at recess, we’d play on these hills.  Without the snow hills, there really wasn’t a whole lot to do on a blacktop schoolyard during the cold winter months.

Pablo, me, Jacklyn, Rachel, and Angela on one of my dad's snow hills.

Every now and then my family would travel to Lake Station, Indiana, to visit family on my dad’s side.  How does one get a family of six into a pickup truck (the only other option was a tiny ‘84 Renault Encore)?  Well, you throw the two smallest family members into the bed.  But what about the thick, sticky tar?  Before we embarked on a trip, my mom would lay one of those homemade knit blankets my great-grandmother made years before down.  Sadly, these blankets were expendable on account of being plentiful.  With my dad behind the wheel and my mom and two older sisters joining in the cab, my little sister and I spent the entire drive along I-90 in the bed.  With crazy windblown hair, we would wave at other cars and miraculously not die.  I will never forget the stench of industry.  My mom told us it was the balloon factory but I’m not exactly sure what it was.  On the way home at night, while shivering in the cold wind, we’d watch the industrial glow of the steel factories light up the skies.  Once, we saw two men running from a car that was engulfed in flames.  It took a lot of skill to peel the blanket off of the sticky bed in order to stay warm.

I know this was a long time ago, but seriously, what were my parents thinking?

One time my dad had me join him on a job site.  He and another guy were to break up an old concrete driveway and re-do it with asphalt.  The jackhammers they used were really loud, so I moved away quite a distance, maybe a hundred yards or so, near a tree.  Well, as luck would have it, a peach pit-sized chunk of concrete went flying toward me and struck my left eye.  A day or so later, I developed an infection in that eye and my mom took me to the doctor. I had to wear a patch.  Not even a cool pirate patch, it was really just gauze and lots of white tape everywhere.  It was embarrassing, and worse still, I had to go to school like this for a week.

Suffice it to say, I never ever felt like paving was in my future.  I’d rather do walkarounds.