Yesterday my son-in-law Pasha and I busted up the concrete walkway around my former-above-ground swimming pool. We rented a jackhammer and started busting up the concrete shortly after nine in the morning. It was hard work, and we alternated on the jackhammer, the person who was taking a "rest" loading the broken sections of concrete into a wheel barrow and dumping it on the side of our property, creating a new mountain. It took about an hour and a half to bust up the sidewalk. Along the way we discovered that there was a solid wall of concrete underneath the sidewalk that went down more than a foot, and then was resting on a concrete footing, the edges of which we couldn't even find. Connecticut Stonehenge. I knew that if I wanted to have a lawn, the top of the conrete wall would have to come off. The wall was in a circle, larger than the swimming pool, so we knew we had out work cut out for us. Chipping the top off a solid wall was much harder than busting up the sidewalk (which was an unneccessary 5" thick to begin with. Sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do, so we attacked the wall. The whole job took five hours, without taking a break. Now I've got to get all the concrete and a ton of sand to the dump. Not today, though.

To make it harder, Pasha is Muslim and he is observing Ramadan for 30 days. He is not allowed to eat or drink, even water, while the sun is up, so he has to finish breakfast before sunrise and can't eat until the sun sets. And no water, even though we were working in the sun for five hours. Pasha is 60, abd he's reaching an age where he feels the effects of working on an jackhammer and loading concrete into a wheel barrow. While we were working, I was thinking of the affluent white kids, down from Connecticut, back in the 60's. They'd arrive in Greenwich Village and sing convict work songs they'd learned from chain gang recordings. They'd sing the appropriate "Whupp" where you let out a grunt, swinging the nine pound hammer, appropriately plucking the bass string on their guitar with a little more force. Pasha and I weren't singing "It takes a rocks and a gravel to make solid road," and nary a single "Lordy" was uttered. But we got the job done.

When I woke up this morning I expected to be full of newly discovered aches and pains. To my surprise, I felt better than I have in months. I guess all that work loosened up the old muscles and stretchewd me out. If you want to try it, I still have a ton of sand and a mountain of busted-up concrete to take to the dump. No charge for the excercise.