The Professor and The Dirty Driveway

As mentioned in an earlier post, during my high school years, on Sabbath mornings, I used to attend a small Synagogue, known as a Shtiebl, as it was located in the basement of a house. I served the role of chanting the weekly portion of the Torah.

One of the few congregants under the age of 65 was an economist, originally from England, who at the time was a professor at the University of Toronto, and who has had a most distinguished career in the field of the history of economics, spanning roughly five decades.

As his house was just a hop, skip and jump from the Synagogue, he used to occasionally invite me over afterwards for Kiddush. For those readers of mine who are unfamiliar with this term, it is, for the purposes of the present context, the ritualized equivalent of coffee and cake.

His better half, hailing from France, is a sweet, demure, intelligent woman. To my teenage mind, she struck me as decidedly reminiscent of a charming character out of a 19th century novel. The three of us would have quite a pleasant time, sitting at their dining room table, engaged in stimulating conversation.

I recall that he once showed me a book he had recently completed, and told me that he was now in the process of putting together the index. He explained to me how creating a book's index was a much more difficult process than most people might realize. (I imagine that all of the advances in computers of the past three decades have automated that process considerably.)

On one particular occasion, the professor and I happened to be standing by the window of his living room, and were presently joined by his wife. We noticed that their neighbor's driveway was full of dirt, and that the neighbor was cleaning the driveway with a water hose. He would very slowly sweep the stream of water across the width of the driveway. When he reached the end, he would advance the stream slightly, and reverse direction, now sweeping the other way. In this manner, the dirt was gradually pushed forward along the driveway, towards the street.

Interestingly, all three of us fell under the hypnotic spell of the action of the hose. It was somehow mesmerizing to watch that border, separating the now-clean portion of the driveway from the still-dirty territory, advance forward, inch by inch (or, for my metric friends, centimeter by centimeter) under the propulsion of the spray of water, like an army division pushing a battle-line forward. The effect was oddly soothing as well.

*Ring!* Hello?

Hi, Frank! What are you doing right now?

Nothing much. What's up?

Well, our neighbor is unwinding his hose -- it looks like he's about to clean his driveway!

Hey, awesome! I'll be right over -- try to make sure he doesn't start till I get there!

Will do, but try to hurry. Carol and David are already here, and I've invited Bev and Gus over too. And the popcorn is in the microwave!

Quite a while the three of us stood there, captivated by this curious form of entertainment which is unlikely to win any awards anytime soon.

Until finally, the professor looked at his wife and me and said: "What are we doing?!" The spell broken, the three of us looked at one another, simultaneously burst into laughter and then returned to the dining room, to resume our conversation.

Postscript. Speaking of being easily entertained, in Street Gang, the encyclopedic chronicle of the television show Sesame Street, author Michael Davis tells us that in the mid-1960s, when children's television was still in its, uh, infancy, children who were up early in the morning would turn on the television and sit and stare at the test pattern until 7 a.m., when the daily programming would begin. If only they had neighbors with dirty driveways...