Recently, I bought a bag of cement. The step up to our front door had cracked and was crumbling like a cement cookie and I had been tasked with going to the home improvement store in order to buy one.
“Don’t get one with too many rocks,” said handyman Ray. “That makes it too rough. We want the smooth kind with sand.”
A bag of cement. Sand, no rocks. That’s a trick a one-trick pony can pull off and have bandwidth left for a second trick.
I had forgotten how many different kinds of cement there were. Yellow bag, blue bag or brown bag, I had no idea. This wasn’t like choosing a color for a vest. If I picked the wrong color, my name was mud and this pony was going back to the barn.
I closed my eyes and floated the color question to the home improvement universe but when the only response I got was “Jingle Bells” and “ha, ha, ha,” over the PA system I looked for somebody in a red vest. I saw a red vest hurrying from lumber toward the paint department and walked fast to catch him before he disappeared into a sea of Swiss coffee and summer wheat.
“Do you know which kind of cement has more sand than rocks?” I asked.
He looked at me as if I had asked him for the nuclear launch codes. He had two options: fake it and wing it or come clean and call a more senior cement person on his walkie-talkie.
He chose door No. 1 but to his credit poked at the yellow bag, which had a torn corner and appeared to have leaked some sand onto the polished concrete floor.
“This looks like it has sand in it,” he said.
It was a leap-of-faith time unless I wanted to lose myself in the never-never land of home improvement paralysis, so I chose the yellow bag. The bag weighed 80 pounds and lay on a pallet that was ground level, shoe level and bend-down-and-pick-me-up level.
There is nothing heavier than a 50-pound bag of cement, that is unless the 50-pound bag weighs 80 pounds. I stared at the bag and the bag stared back as if to say, “You actually think you can pick me up?”
It wasn’t that long ago when 80 pounds was a walk in a cement park. Sure, it was heavy and called on sound body mechanics and lifting techniques, but I was no more wary of an 80-pound bag of cement than I was a tree stump: “No problem, I’ll take two — one under either arm.”
However, now the prospect of picking up a bag of cement is akin to watching somebody run intervals on the bike path.
“I know I used to do that, but I’m not sure how and if I was sure, why would I want to now?”
Moving a fork across the table with your mind is one thing but willing a bag of cement onto a blue flat cart 4 feet high is something Houdini would have struggled with, so I turned to my wingman, the young fellow in the red vest and asked him if he could pick it up for me. I may have mentioned an undiagnosed hernia or an oblique strain even though I’m not sure of where and what the obliques are.
“Of course,” he said and did, picking it up without the sound that I would have surely made that customers would have heard in the paint department, probably in the garden section and maybe at the dollar store two blocks away.
Turns out the cement had rocks in it. No wonder it was so heavy.
December 27, 2020 at 03:45PM
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HERB BENHAM: Let's leave heavy lifting to the pros - The Bakersfield Californian
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Herb
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