Cul de Sac by Richard Thompson for September 08, 2022

oh, Mr. Otterloop

Yikes! Don’t let Dill’s brothers launch broken slabs of asphalt from their trebuchet!

Alice, that chunk is going to be very valuable someday, so you need to find a very secret hiding place, like maybe daddy’s shirt drawer.

Congrats, your child has been selected to get a rare piece of the cul-de-sac.

Sarcasm runs in the family. Save a chunk of asphalt treasure for Dill, Alice.

Story time? I once lived in an old part of the city when they rebuilt the main street. Under 50 years of seal coating the old granite cobblestone paving was still intact. The city guys were being cool and along each block were stacking the pavers up for the neighbors to reuse instead of landfilling them.

These were the lovely big, 6×12 pavers, and they weighed a ton. So it would take multiple trips with a barrow to get them home for a project, but we’re talking hundreds of dollars for a project if we had to buy the little gems, in a neighborhood where most couldn’t afford that kind of expense.

We were all looking forward to our new walks and patios. Folks would cart a few off at a time as they could, but most waited for the weekend for the time to move them.

After a couple weeks of this civilized arrangement, as the project moved into our block and our stacks were set up, suddenly in the middle of the night, a flatbed truck swooped in and carted them all away.

Worse, now that the so and sos knew about it, they just kept hitting the project every night. So, unless you could grab and move the pavers as the guys were working, no more pretty patios.

We were dumbfounded when the local greenhouse had the gall to advertise: “new stock of granite pavers.” Of course it ticked us off so much the neighborhood stopped shopping there.

It ends with a nearly Shakespearean morality lesson on the true cost of greed, and not playing nice with your neighbors. The center ended up going out of business a couple of years later, with the stack of unsold, bogarted pavers going for pennies at their bankruptcy sale.

When we were kids, the gearhead next door would give my engine-obsessed big brother (who was about 12 years younger) his old sparkplugs; Bro had a drawer full of them.

Gotta love kid treasures……………

Almost as funny as the time they put fresh tar on our street (we have oil roads around here) and my dog comes in from outside and walks across the carpeting…

Children’s cupidity can be aroused by the darnedest things. Just last week Alice eagerly “kept” some gravel from the lawn-decorations parking lot.

Look up from your book, Dad. What you find on the dining table will be your own asphalt.

Lucky kids, unlucky parents.

A 4 year old girl that can carry a chunk of asphalt that size? You go, Girl!

Not so lucky Dad Peter-who-doesn’t-pay-attention! Hope you like that chunk of rotting asphalt, Mr.Otterloop, and that Madeline does, too….

Sometimes we’d chew the tar up as “gum”