About 6:30 AM this morning my new garage was delivered, disassembled of course. Now, 6 men are taking all those random boards and pieces of things and being on it, and I mean on it, as in, it is noon here, and the walls and siding are up, and they are at the ‘installing the roof tiles’ portion. I am hiding in the house, pretending not to be here, because all these shirtless workmen are making me uncomfortable, and I am afraid that the proximity of that much half-nudity is dis-encouraging to my tomato plants.
However, I popped in here to share a quick anecdote. One of the shirtless workers is a youngish, maybe college-aged guy. While most of the shirtless are not men one would particularly wish to see shirtless, this one looks like an Abercrombie and Fitch advertisement, the kind I have to avert my eyes from, because I am officially old enough to be the model’s mum. Behind our new garage is an alley, which borders a park, a park with kids’ swings, and few park benches. A park which, since about 8:30AM, has slowly been filling up with gaggles of very young girls, trying desperately to snap a few surreptitious photos of him. It started with one and her dog (and her smart phone), then her two friends suddenly joined her, and now there are more teenaged girls in that park than are likely in the graduating class of the local high school. So much fake squealing and pretending that they all just randomly, one lovely summer day, ended up at a kindergartener playscape in a remote section of the park, one early Wednesday morning. You know, as teenaged girls do. Some of them look out of breath from running over here in order to stroll by nonchalantly, mulitiple times. Everyone has crossed the Rubicon/Alley from the park to my garbage bins, conveniently located right next to my new garage and half-naked workers, in order to throw out their bits of garbage, or pretend bits of garbage. One inventive lass let her dog leash drop just as she passed by, but was rewarded only by a man in his 50s putting his hammer down and scooping up the miscreant canine.
I think my new garage might the filtered backdrop on a dozen instagram photos today, two dozen Facebook photo uploads. They are relentless paparazzi, these girls, snapping away. And who could blame them. It is, after all, a pretty nice looking new garage!