Erosion and the Laetoli Footprints

The guys we pay to paint and prop and mend this aging house are out there in the heat pouring concrete where a footing's gone. I'm worried because I'm eroding, too; to say my bones are honeycombed insults honeycombs, which are strong and organized. So I swallow my calcium and look up concrete. Turns out it's made of water and aggregates— sand, gravel, other offspring of erosion— and Portland cement. And Portland cement is made primarily of calcium. I’d been hoping for something closer to metaphor. ⬧ It’s not just bones. Our frontal lobes erode. Courtesy, tact, all your hard-won restraint, your strength in repressing the true but unkind fact— those are the achievements of your frontal lobes, civilization’s velvet. And they erode. With age those lobes wear thin as linen, thin as the knees of jeans when you were seventeen. So all those grumpy codgers, mean old hags are really stuck in some dumb summer movie where they’re forced to say whatever they are thinking. The truly cursed are those who hear themselves, are horrified, but can’t stop. The brakes are shot, you’re on a switchback mountain road and everyone just thinks you’re a bad driver and a bitch. ⬧ And yet there’s Andrew Hill in Tanzania in ’76, stretched flat on the ground in the late afternoon light because he tripped dodging a huge ball of elephant dung a colleague threw at him. And at that angle he spots, revealed by erosion, the prints of feet. Of walking feet. Of upright, walking feet leaving prints three million years ago. There’s a long story of trying to preserve them and failing. We don’t stop fighting. We don’t win. But we know there were three of them. They stood upright. They walked single file. They stuck together. They took one step after another. We don’t know where they were going, so we’ve got that in common, too.