Sand In My Shoes
I have that spent, too-much-time-in-the-sun feeling tonight following one of the biggest events of the year for our family and our community--Quarry Quest, an annual fundraiser for children's causes held in a huge, bilevel limestone bowl. It was my first time attending since this has historically been a father-son bonding thing, but with Child #2 over the age of two, I had no excuse to stay home.
I'm glad for that, actually. It was quite an experience to see a quarry with a larger population than that of our small city. Really. This festival of sand and stone draws over 40,000 people most years, and with the bright sun and fine temperature we had today, total attendance surely topped that.
We spent nearly six hours there, and, as you can probably guess, that was about 15 minutes too many. I gauge that by the manner in which our tired, tantrum-throwing boy had to be forcibly removed from the asphalt to which he'd collapsed in chagrin at having to split the giant ice cream sandwich Daddy had purchased with his sister. Despite that dramatic finale, there were moments of peace during the day, particularly for the lucky one (me!) who got to stay in the shade of the "mess hall" tent with our napping toddler for almost an hour.
While I was stationed there, I did what everyone sitting in a densely populated space with nothing else to do does--I people-watched. The specimens in this setting were a bit more uniform than one might see while munching nachos at the Chili's in O'Hare--pretty much everyone at Quarry Quest had a child with them--but that did not make for less interesting viewing.
I saw one mother clad in overall shorts with two smallish boys in tow. Her charges had picked up clear plastic drawstring bags full of treasures at one of the dozens of activity booths in the quarry and had apparently grown weary of carrying them, because this poor woman had one bag hanging by the drawstring from each of her overall buttons. The weight of the bags pulled the buttons downward until they were more or less dead-center on her breasts. She looked like some sort of fully-clothed exotic dancer with whacked-out pasties, and I felt for her. I, too, have been (in fact, almost always am) the pack mule for an entire family.
I thought about her as I looked around the place at thousands and thousands of moms and dads in flimsy yellow souvenir hard hats, hauling bags and pushing strollers and carrying children, shaking the sand out of little shoes and doling out sippy cups full of juice and sanitizing small hands that had just finished using porta-potties. I imagined the quarry on Monday, back to normal, full of workers moving rock and driving heavy equipment and sweating in the heat of the day. Maybe it was the sun, maybe it was my unusually mellow state of mind at having nothing specific to do, but it occurred to me that the toil of these two groups was not so different. In each case, it involved hard, physical labor, was utterly exhausting, and could be dangerous if you didn't know what you were doing. And who does?
I'm glad for that, actually. It was quite an experience to see a quarry with a larger population than that of our small city. Really. This festival of sand and stone draws over 40,000 people most years, and with the bright sun and fine temperature we had today, total attendance surely topped that.
We spent nearly six hours there, and, as you can probably guess, that was about 15 minutes too many. I gauge that by the manner in which our tired, tantrum-throwing boy had to be forcibly removed from the asphalt to which he'd collapsed in chagrin at having to split the giant ice cream sandwich Daddy had purchased with his sister. Despite that dramatic finale, there were moments of peace during the day, particularly for the lucky one (me!) who got to stay in the shade of the "mess hall" tent with our napping toddler for almost an hour.
While I was stationed there, I did what everyone sitting in a densely populated space with nothing else to do does--I people-watched. The specimens in this setting were a bit more uniform than one might see while munching nachos at the Chili's in O'Hare--pretty much everyone at Quarry Quest had a child with them--but that did not make for less interesting viewing.
I saw one mother clad in overall shorts with two smallish boys in tow. Her charges had picked up clear plastic drawstring bags full of treasures at one of the dozens of activity booths in the quarry and had apparently grown weary of carrying them, because this poor woman had one bag hanging by the drawstring from each of her overall buttons. The weight of the bags pulled the buttons downward until they were more or less dead-center on her breasts. She looked like some sort of fully-clothed exotic dancer with whacked-out pasties, and I felt for her. I, too, have been (in fact, almost always am) the pack mule for an entire family.
I thought about her as I looked around the place at thousands and thousands of moms and dads in flimsy yellow souvenir hard hats, hauling bags and pushing strollers and carrying children, shaking the sand out of little shoes and doling out sippy cups full of juice and sanitizing small hands that had just finished using porta-potties. I imagined the quarry on Monday, back to normal, full of workers moving rock and driving heavy equipment and sweating in the heat of the day. Maybe it was the sun, maybe it was my unusually mellow state of mind at having nothing specific to do, but it occurred to me that the toil of these two groups was not so different. In each case, it involved hard, physical labor, was utterly exhausting, and could be dangerous if you didn't know what you were doing. And who does?
posted by Lisa Strandberg at 11:34 PM
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