Foundational

When I walked to my car around 6:30 last night, I was definitely going in the wrong direction: all kinds of people were converging on campus to watch the new library's foundation being poured, a 12-hour continuous pour involving many loads of concrete. Little boys on Big Wheels were rattling down the mall to watch the cement mixers line up to offload the cement into a truck that sent the mixture in long tubes down into the pit, a truck that looked like an immense alien inseminating the campus. Students and faculty members gathered on the mall to watch the pour and eat free pizza, and the library director looked as excited as a little boy finding a dump truck under the Christmas tree. I didn't enter the contest to guess how many cubic yards of concrete would go into the foundation and I haven't heard yet who won the $50 prize, but this morning the mall is quiet and the cement mixers are gone and the emerging library has a solid foundation. That's the only prize I need.