For about a month now I’ve been doing some research about local concrete companies to get some bids on a new driveway at our residence. I know about as much about concrete as the man on the moon. I do know that I stuck my hand in a newly laid and perfectly smooth concrete pad in our backyard when I was a kid, sparking the wrath of the returning concrete workers the next morning, and anyone who ever tried to dribble a basketball in that area for the next ten years. But it was worth it.
In my search for the right concrete company, the first place I looked was in an antiquated small black address book I have kept for most of my adult life. For the history buffs out there, you might be interested to know that the first address book was invented in 1630. It was at that time the infamous pirate, Skully Blackfog, better known as just Skulls, began to keep a log in a bound sharkskin volume strung together with clam cartilage. Inside, Skulls, as he was known to his crew, kept a detailed list of specialists who could treat him with his stomach issues, as he had survived mainly on whale tongue and whiskey during his stint at a pirate.
However, Skulls also was an insufferable insomniac, tossing and turning through the night because of the incessant repetition of waves rolling under his ship, a droning white noise that others on deck found rather comforting and reassuring after a hard day of pillaging and plundering. (Worth noting: British civilians actually wore conch shells on their ears during the day so they could experience the sound of the sea all day long). Out at sea however, the crispy Captain couldn’t sleep at all, and that led to a lot of irritable mornings where he angrily threw crew members overboard, and slapped parrots off the shoulder of anyone who got too close.
Let’s face it, no one likes a pirate that got up on the wrong side of the hammock. At the urging of his crew, Skulls began a world-wide search for sleep potions, entering each one into his handy dandy sharkskin address book. Believe it or not, Skulls died in his sleep, donating his address book to International Museum of Sleep Deprivation, where it rests to this day next to his hammock. I read all about him late one night when I couldn’t sleep myself and was led down a rabbit hole google search for Pirates who also did concrete work on the side.
And it hit me! Why wasn’t I looking in my very own book instead of this confound computer? My address book has contacts in it from the last thirty-five years! I blasted out of bed like cannon fodder, (just to keep the metaphor consistent), exploded into the galley (that’s kitchen in pirate language), excited to have an encyclopedic source for concrete at my very disposal (not translatable).
As the drama unfolded, literally, I flipped to the C’s but found nothing there that began with the letter C – not concrete companies, or even one cement contact. The only references I found were words that were related in some far-fetched way. For example, I had the phone number for a guy named Plebus Tanks who I used to play tennis with twenty years ago. He was rather lousy at tennis, an otherwise upstanding citizen, but a man nonetheless who regularly cheated at tennis, so I put him in the C’s for Cheater. Down a couple of spaces was Frank’s Plumbing, a plumbing service I liked very much because the owner himself once slithered like an army man through our spider-infested crawl space to locate our leaking pipe. He crawled, so I found him there too, in the C’s, not under F for Frank’s or P for Plumbing.
As I began to leaf through more pages searching the high seas for the elusive Abominable Concrete Man, I realized that most of the people I had listed had little or nothing to do with the letter they should be filed under! The contacts I had acquired over the years were scattered about like so much driftwood on the open seas and left to be washed tither and yon throughout the alphabet of my book. Simply put, there was no organizational system at all that I could see – no order and no logic. On the bright side, the book would make a brilliant model as an uncrackable code of some kind during wartime should the need arise, perhaps by the CIA or NORAD, but otherwise it was totally useless. On a typical day here at home, here’s what finding someone in my address book sounds like:
“Honey, remember that gutter person we used a couple of years ago?” I started.
You mean the guy that was afraid of heights? She asked.
“Yea that one,” I say. “What was his name, do you remember?”
Well, look in your black book under G!” My wife quickly added.
“I did, but he wasn’t there, not in the G’s.”
“Well, look under L for ladders,” she suggested.
“Nope,” I say flipping through, “he’s not there either.”
“How about look under…mmm… what is it when you have a fear of heights? Acrophobia? Yes, try that!”
“Nope. He’s not under the A’s,” I reply. “Wait a minute wasn’t he the one who said he played the xylophone in the high school marching band?”
“Yes!!” we both say in unison, and then I immediately turned to X’s, where, sure enough, our Gutter Man is right there, with his name sticking out like a sore thumb. How could I be so dumb – of course Gutter would be under X!
Never again I thought! Never, would I put so much stock in the order of names, their respective association with a letter! What I had learned is that my black book was not an address book at all or a book with phone numbers either. This was a book of puzzles, and senseless connections, a volume of mysterious relationships that would only be useful if I was not looking for anything at all. Trying to use it as a reference book is very similar to the kind of aimless meandering I do when I hunt for seashells on the beach. In that state, I’m not really interested in finding anything. I’m just out for a stroll on the address book of life, smelling the ocean waves, maybe waving at perfect strangers as they pass by under the pages of my fingers, not wanting any close contact of course, and hoping a megalodon tooth from ten thousand years ago will wash up at my feet, and then wash back out with the next foamy wave of thought.
It was then that I remembered the most famous of all pirate sayings, the phrase that everyone goes to when they think of those criminals of the high seas and that is this: “ARRrrrrrr Matey!” Everyone knows that phrase, it’s like a bad joke when you talk about pirates, but we say it anyway. But is it, I wondered? Maybe what Skully Blackfog, that most infamous of pirates meant when he said “ARRrrr” was in fact just plain “R”, as in the letter R!
Inspired, as if I had just been hit by a cannon shot across my forehead bow, I excitedly turned to the letter R in my black address book and found just what I had been looking for all along!
There, right there, as the first entry, under the letter R was the word Rough Sea Cement Company, contractor. I closed my address book, put my conch shells over my ears and went back to bed listening to the calming sounds of concrete being poured, and dreaming of a brand-new cement driveway.