Construction Season

It had been a long summer in the city, which is to say a long construction season. Almost all the potholes had been filled. The orange cones had been removed from the pavement. The jackhammers had fallen silent. The hardhats were hung up on their hooks. The dump-trucks and backhoes and bulldozers, parked in their sheds. The scars were healing over. The new coat of paint was drying. The towers, downtown, were newly finished, gleaming. Their windows held clouds in their panes, a herd of them, huddled together, rumbling low on the horizon.

“Well, that about does it! It looks like they are almost done. They are putting on the finishing touches.” I turned to face my father, the towering presence in the driver’s seat, working the levels, pushing the buttons, manning the vessel. The passenger seat dwarfed my small frame, considerably smaller than my peers. My feet, dangling off the edge of the seat, didn’t quit reach the floormats.

I was hoping to impress my father, who knew everything, with my astute observations. Astuteness, I was convinced, was all I had, my only card to play, unlike my siblings, so big for their ages, so often praised for the size and strength. But my comment, a misfire, didn’t have the desired effect. My father was more perplexed than pleased. At the helm, brow furrowed in concentration, he cast his gaze through the windshield, into the cluster of cars, the swarm of pedestrians.

I decided to try again. “When do you think they will be finished? Any day now, right?” Still no dice. Silent, like a cliff face or the flank of a skyscraper, he activated the turn-signal and veered from the thoroughfare to a side street. He knew all the shortcuts, all the secrets.

“Son, I’m not sure what you’re talking about. You’re going to have to be clearer when you speak.”

Source: Punch in New York (1991), written and illustrated by Alice Provensen

“The city!” My voice was shrill, even to my own ears. I did my best to drop it down a few notches, convinced that, if I disguised my real voice, my father would take me more seriously. “They have been working on it for a long time now. They should be finished any day now.” I wasn’t trying to be funny, but my father laughed, a hearty crack of laughter that filled the cab.

“Well, that’s not quite how it works, son.” I turned away from my father, from his mountainous voice, from his words which could have been inscribed in stone tablets, and stared through the windshield, past the intersection, past the cars, past the pedestrians, past all the particularities to something more general. “The city is never finished,” he continued. “It breaks a little each year, and we fix it as we go.”

I didn’t want to interrupt, but I couldn’t contain myself. “But it looks like we are closer than ever to being all caught up.”

“Wait until winter comes.”

Winter did come. Rivulets of water invaded the cracks in the pavement, and then the water froze and expanded. Holes appeared all over the place, cracks and craters. Some of them, gaping, were big enough to swallow up small children, the late bloomers.

Source: Daisy, Tell Me! (1971), written by Mary Calhoun and illustrated by Janet McCaffery

Before the snow began to thaw and the earth soften, my father had moved out of our apartment, on the top floor of a Ravenswood four-flat, overlooking the tracks. He found a new place, across town, on Pulaski, where the train lines didn’t reach. On Sunday mornings, his spot on the pew, next to my mother, was empty. The choir director, younger than mother, left the congregation around the same time. Her voice no longer floated above our bowed heads, angelic, never missing a note, some much more worthy than the rest of us. He visited from time to time, called from time to time, but progressively less so. At first, I would listen for his voice, sententious, listen for his commandments, but progressively less so. I would look for him in the passing cars, in the steady stream of pedestrians, in the spaces between the buildings and trees, but progressively less so.

Spring rolled around and coughed leaves from the ends of the branches. Pointy little yellow flowers topped the dandelion stalks. The winds from the lake spread the pollen from one neighborhood to another, from Ravenswood all the way to Pulaski. The orange vests took to the streets, armed with cones and road-block signs. The cracks in the concrete were covered with seams of hot tar. The mouths of the potholes were filled with steaming asphalt. The days grew longer, the grass higher, and fruit ripened on the vine.

With time, I understood that my father had been right. There is no endpoint, no finish line, a ribbon that you can cross with up-raised arms and exclaim, « I did it. I have arrived. » The city, like its residents, is not fixed, written in stone, but made of a softer something, bubbling over, splitting at the seams, constantly undoing itself, buckling under the weight of its own impossible projects. Inevitably the cracks appear, the stretch lines, the rifts. Come construction season, we patch up as best we can, and then we brace ourselves for winter.

Source: Spring Snow (1963), written and illustrated by Roger Duvoisin