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Don't
Eat That
By Matthew Miller
There's nothing like the acrid smell of freshly
laid asphalt. On this, the hazy afternoon in question, a single,
ponderous steamroller wandered back and forth across a sea of the
stuff in a manner that could only be described as, well, steamrollerish.
The motion of this great blacktop-mushing mechanical marvel seemed
almost agonizingly, painstakingly hebetudinous - slow - as it completed
the creation of yet another suburban subdivision driveway. Its bemused
operator extended his jovial countenance in the direction of the
little boy who sat playfully at his workplace's edge.
It probably wasn't safe to let him play there, but hey…life is full
of uncertainties, so why ruin everything needlessly? The little
boy, for one, was fully cognizant of the danger posed to him by
the steamroller, and he was just as fully confident in the capability
of his neuromuscular system to get him safely out of its way should
such an occasion arise.
You're probably wondering what the boy was doing. You needn't fret;
he really wasn't doing anything noteworthy at all. Primarily, he
was engaged in resting comfortably on his laurels by the garage,
enjoying the bemused steamroller operator's pedantic grinning and
leisurely patting the edge of the driveway with the flat of a small
trowel. It made a dull "thump, thump" with each strike due to the
asphalt's not having completely solidified.
It was this particular aural quality of the driveway that piqued
the three-year-old lad's curiosity. He reached out his pudgy fingers
and dug them into the surface of the roadway. Well, tried to. Noting
the resistance of the warm surface to change, his eyes trailed down
the slope at the blacktop's edge to where it met the grass. Scattered
at the base of this two-dimensional earth-blanket were little tarred-and-blackened
pebbles of asphalt. They were very hard, and not terribly comfortable.
He knew this from first-hand experience; he was sitting on three
of them.
In between the scattered bits of blacktop and the actual surface
itself was the brief, raised slope of the driveway's edge. This
seemed a much more promising subject, and the scoop of his hand
proved a ready opponent to the recalcitrance of the tepid, gooey
mass. By all accounts, it was a successful completion to the project:
The steamroller operator held his hard-hat in his hand as he stood
in reverent review of his work, and the little boy held the piece
of driveway in his hand as he sat in a reverent review of his own.
You guessed it. He put it in his mouth. He even attempted to chew
thoughtfully, as his oft-splattered mother had carefully instructed
him. It didn't work. Off went the steamroller and out came the asphalt.
Both were glad to see the other go. Crying and finding his legs,
the boy ran inside to his mommy, and the remains of the asphalt
brownie lay where they fell.
The moral of this story? Sometimes in life, the subconscious desire
to eat something will be accompanied by the equally subconscious
understanding that it is not meant to be eaten. Heed that latter
premonition, my friends, and obey.
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