One thing that didn't hold up so well though, was the driveway. By the time I was in college, twenty winters had taken their toll on the pavement. Over the summers, with no regard for me getting black lung, my mother would badger me to throw a layer of tar down in a last ditch effort to save it. I would do the most half assed job you could imagine. Half the grass would be covered in tar as would my Jordans.
Finally one summer there was so little holding the driveway together that Sybil relented to have it repaved. I was shocked she was going to invest in her home. She always had the belief you never put too much money in a home, just enough so it is salable. What was next, double-paned windows?
I came home one day from my summer job as a mail man (another story), and I noticed just a small portion of the driveway had fresh pavement. It was just laid over the crumbling old driveway in a sad looking clump. I asked Sybil and she said they just began work and were figuring it out. Okay, I guess that makes sense. The next day I came home and another small section was paved over. So odd! Then the same the following day, and the following day, and the following day, until there was a patch work of new pavement covering the old driveway.
Sybil eventually told me what she did. She saw some workers paving a street a few blocks away and she worked out a deal that at the end of the day the workers would use what they had left over to repave her driveway. For a couple hundred bucks under the table they just took the pavement from the city and threw it on top of our old shitty driveway. When I went outside with Sybil to inspect the final product, Sybil looked at it, looked at my face and said "It's good enough."
Quality at its best.
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