Mike McCormack - Solar Bones

I love that we’re living the kind of life where things are wearing down around us

her blessing on our lives together and all the stuff which had gathered to it, knives, furniture, appliances and utensils, all the things which crossed the grain of our days, losing some of their gloss and sheen in their contact with us but their rounded edges and corners now fitting our hands more easily, leaning to their purpose with greater ease and balance and if I loved all that — which I did — I was even more grateful to be sharing a life with someone who could draw attention to such things and think them worthy of comment and at that moment the prospect of a life with Mairead stretched out ahead of me with

you’re daydreaming

what

I said tell me about the day the foundation went in

yes, I was, my mind elsewhere

same as it was the morning I pulled into the construction site, just as it was coming up to nine o’clock so I sat in the car listening to the news on the radio before I got out into one of those dry March mornings which, even at that early hour, with a cold blue sky overhead, promised to be perfect for pouring concrete and there

were five or six men already on-site, a couple of them in high- visibility vests, one of them sitting in the back of the van pulling on his boots, two others already inside the timbered shuttering, walking carefully over the steel mesh underfoot, checking the wire ties beneath, hunkering down over it for a closer look, men killing time for a few minutes because as yet there was no sign of the concrete trucks so I pulled on the high-vis jacket as Curran himself, the contractor, came towards me, folding his phone away into the jacket and calling to me in a loud voice as if I were a lot further away than the ten feet separating us, yelling

two minutes, they’re just out the road

and we shook hands and walked over to the timbered frame and I saw straight away that the steel mesh over the radon barrier was a tidy piece of work, all the excess wire on the ties neatly snipped away and fastened at every intersection so there was no danger of it moving when the concrete was poured or when it hardened and it was clear that there were good tradesmen at work here and as ever it was a pleasure to stand and admire neat work and notice all those small finishing details which reveal just how much a man respects his own trade even if his work, like these neatly clipped ties, would ultimately be buried under concrete for the rest of eternity, it was still easy to admire such care and attention and Curran must have seen my approval because he added that

the two Crayns are putting up the blocks

Walter and Frank

Walter and Frank, they’ll be here in a couple of weeks and

you could see he was pleased to have contracted the two brothers who were generally acknowledged to be the best block-layers in the area, block-layers whom roofers and plasterers loved following after because they knew that the walls would be smooth and swept and their own work would look tidy also, roofers especially appreciated them, they knew that the walls would not need any building up or levelling, the whole thing would be neat and tidy or, as one carpenter said about following their work

you just lay your roof down on the walls like you were putting on your cap as

the first of the concrete trucks turned in at the site entrance, the driver gearing down and braking to a halt at the entrance to hail Curran, leaning out to take directions onto the site before slowly rolling on again, the lorry making its way down the path and the driver steering with one hand and leaning out the side window to get a sense of how solid the temporary surface was because there was a slight give under the wheels as he kept her going steady with the ground compacting under the great weight, rolling on slowly until it pulled up beside the concrete pump which rose from the back of its truck and angled up over the site like a praying mantis and by now the two men had stepped outside the shuttering and were standing by with shovels and floats ready as the driver jumped down from the cab to have a few words with Curran as he set about coupling the pump to the truck and

every man scanned the sky and there was general agreement that the day would keep fine, there might be a few showers all right later on but there would be no harm in it as long as this cold spell held, the driver saying thoughtfully

a great day for cooling soup or pouring a foundation, whichever job was in front of you before

the concrete sluiced from the pressurised hose over the middle of the shuttering, pouring out in a thick slurry over the radon barrier, pooling and then spreading under its own weight before eventually rising over the steel mesh when the men moved in with floats to spread it out evenly to the corners, by which time I had performed the first slump test, upending a cone of concrete on the spot-board and measuring the slump after the cone had been removed from around it, to find that the fall was well within tolerance so that was ok, and I swept the concrete off the board and stood back to watch the men level out the screed, one of them stepping through it with the vibrator under his arm, pokering it into the concrete which immediately lost all its resistance and liquefied to settle into its natural level between the shuttered sides so that the two men coming behind him could smooth it over with a screeding board, drawing it over the wet surface to leave it glossed and smooth behind them and even though

I’ve seen it done umpteen times before, there is still something to wonder at in the pouring of a concrete foundation, the way it draws so many skills and strengths together, the timing and cooperation needed and the way the rising and spreading tide of concrete itself demarks, as no other stage in the building process can, the actual from the theoretical, makes the whole thing real in a way that site-clearing or the digging out of the foundation itself can never do, all these are definite staging posts in any structure’s transition from the abstract but none of them separate so clearly the ideal realm of plans and paperwork from the physical world than the pouring of concrete, the building at last beginning its rise out of the ground and seeing it for so many years on so many public buildings — libraries, water-purifying plants and so on — twenty years of this still had not taken the excitement out of it for me, that uncanny sense of a building beginning to take on mass and shape in the blue light of the world where so many things can go wrong between this first pour and that ceremonial occasion when

the building is finally dedicated to its civic purpose with some official event to mark its opening which will of course be attended by all the local bigwigs — the local priest, members of the GAA, the parish council — all those local organisations which organise the life of any small town or village in this part of the world and since

I have attended so many of these ribbon-cutting ceremonies, stood out of shot with my hands folded across my chest, I sometimes allow myself the belief that I have given my life to something which has been on the side of human betterment, an idea which takes hold of me with such insistence that the part of me which needs to have faith in things starts seeing it as a religious vocation with its own rituals and articles of faith not to mention a reckoning in some vaulted and girdered hereafter where engineer’s souls are weighed and evaluated after a lifetime’s wear and tear in the friction of this world, standing before some tribunal where you point to your works and say

these are the things I have signed my name to, these are the things to which I have given my best energies and inspiration

these hospitals and libraries

these water treatment plants