A Book Report from the Tenth Grade
On Saturdays at around 6 AM, the bread, the rolls, and the doughnuts have all been baked. The goods have been sorted and sent up front to the store or placed near the back to be loaded in the food truck. And although the ovens have been turned off, the heat in the bakery is hovering around the upper end of comfortable. It is at this time that cleaning begins.
As I am still the outsider in the group, I stand out of the way, often being called over to help lift something heavy while someone else cleans in or around it. However, raised to be helpful (read: voluntold throughout my youth to assist unwillingly), I volunteer to help where I can. This is where I acquired the task of cleaning a large metal widget used in portioning out dough.
This widget is a hollow stainless steel cylinder about two feet in length and about one foot in diameter. It has around 50 octagonal holes about four inches in diameter paired around its circumference, which is how the dough is portioned. I was assigned the task of using an old butter knife and scraping off any dried dough found. This dried dough loves to sit in the corners of these octagons. Normally, it takes a half an hour to finish this task.
I always enter this task thinking that I will be able to tackle some pending introspection, perhaps assess my journey thus far and see if any deviations are necessary. Unfortunately, as the task is so overwhelmingly tiresome, there is no hope for one’s mind to wander. I had a fantastic job in college; I worked at the campus mailroom. This job provided no challenge, but it did require some thinking as you sorted mail or contemplated the most efficient route so as to leave time to pick up a BAC (big-ass cookie) in the university center. The banality of scraping metal on metal for 30 minutes is simply too overwhelming.
Yesterday, while working through my unsavory task, I recalled an assignment that I had in the tenth grade: a book report. Looking back, it seems quite rudimentary to be assigned to read a book and give an oral presentation as a sophomore in high school. Regardless, I do recall joining the class in the school library and searching out a book with a narrow spine. What I will come to learn is that I had discovered the most pointless book I have read to date.
The 79 Squares by Malcolm J. Bosse
Even at that age, I questioned why anyone would be able to create 79 squares in a backyard. Mathematically, you could not create a true rectangle as 79 is a prime number (unless, of course, you had 79 squares end to end). But I am getting ahead of myself. The point of the book is that a rough youth is trespassing through a backyard on his way to buy weed, when an 82-year-old man stops him and convinces him to grid out his backyard into 79 squares. (Again, is there a water feature – maybe a bird bath – or maybe it’s a triangular yard.) The 14-year-old returns throughout the summer to intently investigate each yarn-defined square day by day. I could not remember the book title originally, so this was my Google search: “book about child running through old man’s yard comes back to explore squares”. It was the second result returned.
The book is as boring as it sounds. As my sophomore class presentations rolled on, my fellow students gave their opinions on their chosen books, which varied from insightful recommendations to obvious cliff notes summaries. If I recall accurately, I believe I was the only student to give a resounding ‘do not read’ in his report. And, yes, there are those readers that applaud the relationship formed between two unlikely people, and they may point out the wealth of wisdom that an older generation has to give; but staring at a small portion of a backyard for days on end? I’m glad that kid did not have access to my butter knife.
Available on Amazon Kindle for $3.99.
