Monkey Gold

When I was a kid, there was gold in the streets.  It would sparkle and glitter in the sunshine.  It broke our hearts when it was part of the street and we couldn’t get at it.  We would spend hours sifting through the stones on the shoulders of the road and collect the pyrite as though it was real gold.  It was a pretty, sparkly rock.  Funny — for all quartz can look like diamonds, we weren’t very interested in that.  We all went for the gold.  Monkey gold.  It had value to us – some intangible child-value that couldn’t be explained yet we all understood.  And of course we liked to think about what if this one wasn’t monkey gold?  Maybe this one is REAL!

Asphalt pretty much ended all of that.  In asphalt, all of the stone is uniformly coated in tar.  Asphalt holds stone together so that there is no longer a treasure trove of rubble on the shoulders of the road.  Asphalt is smooth so that bicycles and roller skates don’t have to struggle and I’m sure that road rash isn’t as severe as it was on tarred and chipped roads like we had then.

Still, it’s sad to think that there’s no longer treasure right outside by the road and all you need is a few hours of an endless summer day to find it.