I am watching something beautiful unfold before my eyes this morning.
High on the rooftop a few houses away, there is a group of men scraping shingles off. They are seated in a row along the top edge of the roofline, their legs hanging down the steep slope. They are harnessed and roped at the waist.
Crowbars in hand, their work makes a percussive ‘clack clack clack’ that comes through my window. It’s a pleasing sound, and every few minutes, distracted from my line of thought, I put my head out to see how the boys are getting along.
They remind me of those old black-and-white panoramas of men eating their lunches while dangling off a crossbeam at the top of a skyscraper. Like them, there is something perilous and hardy and carefree about these roofers which I like and which stirs a sweet sort of envy. I want a crowbar. I want to work up a sweat. Maybe not always, but this morning I do.
Years ago when I worked in a cubicle, I felt something similar whenever I went outside and saw the landscaping crew planting new beds of flowers and shoveling truckbeds of mulch into the hedges. I wanted to trade with them even for a day.
Below the roofers there is a large, blue tarp spread over the edge of the gutter to catch the shingles, and it too has somehow caught the beauty of the scene. The sunlight is striking it and giving it a silver sheen, and the way the wind tugs it this way and that it reminds me of so many things I love and miss. One moment it looks like an oversize superhero cape. The next it reminds me of that game we played in elementary school with the great multicolored parachute which we would raise and lower in a giant circle.
Here is a beautiful scene. It’s not beautiful in the way sunsets are obviously beautiful. It’s beautiful in a way that Whitman saw when he tramped across the United States singing songs of the common place. Of people doing good work, demanding work.
I am more than an onlooker this morning; I’m an admirer.
show & tell 