A few years back, William Kinsella, one of Canada’s finer short story writers, was attending a reading by Canada’s — and probably the world’s — finest short story writer, Alice Munro.
Kinsella noticed a curious thing. As Munro read, the audience laughed repeatedly and uproariously. Reading audiences are normally about as jovial as Stephen Harper with mumps.
After the reading, Kinsella mentioned it to Munro and said that he’d never thought of her work as funny. Munro smiled and said “Bill, everything is funny,”
Well, exactly. Take cement. Superficially, few things could be less funny than cement. It is bland, undifferentiated, mostly grey, the epitome of unsexy — again, like Stephen Harper.
But unsexy doesn’t mean unimportant. Bland old boring cement is the elemental binder of human architecture. Without cement we wouldn’t have the Taj Mahal, Chartres Cathedral or the George Massey tunnel.
Builders figured that out centuries ago.
The ancient Romans even gave us our word for it. They call the mixture of crushed rock and burnt limestone they used ‘opus caementicium’.
So cement is a certifiable big deal — but funny?
Actually, yes.
Cement plays a critical role in one of my favourite barroom stories. A Readymix truck driver stops by his home during a work run to discover a shiny Cadillac convertible parked in his driveway.
He tiptoes to the bedroom window, peeks in, discovers his wife is entertaining a strange man within. Tiptoes back to his cement truck, backs it up to the Cadillac, places the chute in back seat of Cadillac and dumps his load.
Such a satisfying story — almost too good to be true. In fact, it IS too good to be true. It’s an urban legend that’s been making the rounds for the past 40 years at least.
Sometimes the cement-filled car is a Cadillac, other times it’s a DeSoto, or a Triumph TR3.
Some people insist it actually happened to Don Tyson, president of Tyson Foods, Inc. That story goes that Tyson’s wife spied her husband’s expensive new Cadillac parked in the driveway of another woman’s house, so she ordered up a load of concrete and had it delivered — through the passenger’s side window.
Except it never happened.
In 1992, the Public Relations department of Tyson Foods, Inc. officially declared the story to be a fake. They also said they’d been hearing it for at least 20 years.
Great story.
Too bad it never happened.
But here’s one that did — last month on a highway outside San Francisco, an impatient guy in a Porsche 911 found himself at the end of a long line of cars that weren’t moving. He honked, he shook his fist, he said several bad words — then he put his car in first gear and drove around the line of cars.
Right into a lane of freshly poured cement. The Porsche sank about a foot before it came to a rather final stop.
True story — and it reminds me of another barroom story.
Guy is tooling along a country road in his Porsche, well over the speed limit, comes over a rise and hits a cow broadside. When the cops show up the guy is standing, bleeding, by his totaled sports car wailing, “My Porsche! My beautiful Porsche!”
The cop says, “You yuppies make me puke. You’re flying down the road ‘way over the speed limit; you kill an innocent cow — and look, you tore your right arm off! And all you can think about is your Porsche???
Guy looks at his empty right sleeve and wails “My Rolex! My beautiful Rolex!”
— Arthur Black is an author and humour
columnist. He lives on Saltspring Island.
