The Interloper

 

All in all, it's better than having a jack o' lantern smashed in your yard.

This week’s haul:

PAPER GOODS, Food related

• 3 Napkins, one Subway
• 1 Coffee cup w/lid, Royal Farms

PAPER GOODS, Non-food

• 1 Receipt, Rite Aid
• 1 Brown paper bag

FOOD & DRINK, Savory

• 1 Crystal water
• 2 Red peppers
• 1 Dunkin’ Donuts plastic cup

FOOD & DRINK, Sweet

• 1 Dots, fun size
• 1 Dunkin’ Donuts Breakfast box

MISCELLANEOUS

• 1 Cigarette wrappers
• 2 Cigarette butts
• 1 Aluminum foil sheet
• 1 Sock
• 1 Brick, origin unknown

ACTUAL CRAP

• 1 Pile crap, bagged

Striped footie.

I’ll touch on a few of these items before discussing the interloper. The sock has been taking its sweet time making its way to the yard. I first noticed it in the street well over a month ago, when it was still attached to its mate. Someone had lost a fresh pair of socks on the mean streets of Hampden. I was actually excited to see that it finally made it to me. Six weeks to make it twenty feet.

The peppers are decidedly the most perplexing new arrival. While there is more than one grocery store in the vicinity, I don’t think of Hampdenites purchasing a lot of fresh vegetation. I’m not sure what would prompt not just the depositing but the smashing of two sweet red peppers. Maybe Pistachio Man decided to give peppers a try, and found them a complete disappointment, both in texture and front stoop mortar removal? Perhaps someone forget to purchase a Halloween pumpkin, and tried pepper carving in a pinch?

I'm not sure where this interloper came from, but he's not part of my flock.

The brick, unlike the sock and the peppers, simply offends me. I’m not ashamed to admit that I’m something of a brick connoisseur. Or maybe just a hoarder. But for some reason, I love bricks. Not just any old bricks, mind you; mine come from Lake Erie. I’m from Erie, Pennsylvania, and have spent most of my life in, on, or very close to our Great Lake. When my mother finally moved to the beach, she became obsessive about collecting beach glass, which I believe should qualify as a full contact sport for Erieites. I became obsessive about flotsam and jetsom. If the lake throws up a plastic Army guy, I am compelled to take him home. Sometimes she gives me money, which is always appreciated. I make at least twenty bucks a summer that way. She also gave me a really nice men’s Seiko watch, which is, according to the jeweler, quite valuable. It’s rather huge and ugly, and contributes to a general mien of dykeiness, but I feel obligated to appreciate her present. Some poor fisherman still regrets its loss, I’m sure. She also sends me candy. And I eat it, to my mother’s dismay. Not a summer has gone by without a Sixlets or a mint finding its way to me. Again, it’s a sense of duty. Mother nature knows I love candy; who am I to spurn her gifts?   There is one item that washes up, above all others, that I am unable to resist: the brick.

A little gift from Mother Nature. Brick on Lake Erie, Erie, PA August 17, 2010.

After a good storm, the beach will be dotted with terra cotta rectangles, edges worn from years of tumbling along the depths of Lake Erie. I have hauled tons of these bricks for miles up and down Presque Isle. Sympathetic family members (enablers) indulge my obsession, and add to the collection, which grows in my mother’s parking space over the course of every summer. Infidels occasionally steal them to prop open doors, resulting in a verbal or written evisceration. I’ve not herniated myself lugging tons of building materials around for someone else’s door wedge. For years I’ve believed that the bricks are the result of the city dumping the torn down remnants of Erie’s industrial corridor into the lake. As an historian with a fondness for Erie’s Victorian brick factories, now mostly destroyed, I’ve always felt like I was saving a bit of Erie’s history.

I am not ashamed.

The brick pile residing in my basement in Baltimore has made me subject to some well deserved teasing from those aware of it. The pile has traveled from Erie via Mini Cooper, first to Hyattsville and now to Baltimore. I had to overinflate Archibold’s tires to prepare for the undercarriage-scraping journey.  When I talked of moving into a houseboat, there was no shortage of jokes about the likelihood of the brick pile sinking my new abode. Now I have a pile of handsome bricks in my basement, waiting for me to utilize them in an appropriately creative manner.

So I was very offended when this interloper appeared in the yard, and several of my friends assumed that it had simply escaped from my basement, in the hopes of finding a better life for itself. In defense of my weighty obsession, I put my invaluable curatorial assistant—my mother—on the case. She contacted Lake Erie historian and man about town Dave Frew, who had this to say: “Since Lake Erie is home to about 3,000 shipwrecks and many of those were late 19th Century materials transport ships hauling everything from stone and lumber to bricks and other construction materials, lots of bricks have been planted on the lake bottom.  In addition to those bricks, there was a lot of brick construction along the lake shore, sometimes bricks and other materials were used as “rip-rap” in dock construction.  All of these bricks have a way of being moved in ice, tumbling in sand and waves, breaking up and washing up on beaches.”

While slightly disillusioned, I don’t love them any less.

The brick has all sorts of household applications.