Levon’s bristles, Ashley’s bristles

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levon's paint brushes

levon's bristles

I think it’s going to rain me out today.  I would love for it not to.  Yesterday I was painting an old Folk Victorian house in Historic Mechanicsville, running around on ladders with buckets of four colors that adorn the decorative woodwork.  It was 63 degrees in late January and I was glad to be outside, bringing the bones back to life.  Nothing is more thankful than an old house.

Today we will have a how-to blog, followed by a baby picture for those who want to scroll down and read no further.

The trick to painting, and this may seem over simple, is applying material.  One has to know what a brush will do, how much paint a brush will hold, and what something should look like when it’s time to move on.  I spend a lot of my time trying to improve my methods, and a lot of this I’m still working out.  Here are some things I’ve learned.

Ornate, repetitive woodwork that is often very high will leave you figuring out which way to work your ladders, which faces faces should be painted in what order, fixing bad wood or flaked paint that you missed during prep, and how to always be doing something with the brush you have in your hand.  When you’re running up and down, moving ladders and buckets around, cleaning, wiping drips, and scratching your head, you are not applying material.

Painting is two-fold: you’ve got to go the distances and got to get the details.  Mix it up for your sanity, and it isn’t a bad place to start by going with how you feel.   If I’m feeling patient, I’ll paint the rings on columns which need to be pencil tight.  If I’m restless and have had my coffee, I’ll throw the ladder against the side of the house and go.  It’s all gotta get done.  Always start top to bottom, meaning go high and work down as much as you can.  Remember your left hand/ right handedness as to which way you work.  Try to work above the end of your ladder, in other words don’t be reaching through it, behind it, etc.  Ladder placement depends on the terrain of the yard and features of the house so you’ll just have to cipher as you go depending on your job.  Use a step ladder when you can, it’s best to stay off the paint and also you can reach further from one spot.  Get a ladder hook for your paint bucket so you’re not having to hold it.  Use the brush holes in the ladder or the hollow spaces in the rung to hold your bristles sideways.  Now, lets talk about those bristles.

Ashley's addair's assortment of paintbrushes

Ashley's bristles

I’m learning it’s okay to need a lot of brushes.  I’ll keep a six inch cigar roller with me, a three inch fencepost brush, and a two and half inch sash brush.  Or, a two inch flat brush instead, and I’ll explain.

You should always use as big a brush as you can get by with.  They hold the most material, and remember what I told you about the key to painting.  I like a three inch flat brush or “fencepost.”  They can trim straight lines and cover really well, but they’re a big brush if you don’t have a solid grip on painting.  They’re not good for corners, little trim pieces, or windows.  For that, I keep an angled (sash) brush.  Until recently I used only the angled brush for trim, but it doesn’t hold nearly the amount of paint.  Some people use only a two inch flat brush because they are the most versatile, meaning they hold more paint and can fit into corners.  I like the 3″ flat and 2 1/2″ sash combo for really tight corners and really fast wide open areas.  Of course, if there is anyway possible I’m going to try and roll the paint on first with my cigar roller and back brush it with the 3″.  Old houses often have alligatored siding and deep grooves so try and use a thick nap on the roller.  You’ll still never get it all, and you need the fencepost brush to jab and slash.  However, if you’re doing something smaller than cleaning two brushes makes sense for, just grab the 2″ flat brush.  So basically you need all three.  And a roller with different naps.  The thing with nap- the thicker you go, the slower and messier they get.  Make sure the roller has a tipped edge so you can paint a thin line with it, i.e. the grooves in textured soffits.  Always use an extension when you can and save yourself ladder height and ladder moves.

Another thing, keep a damp rag at all times.  A drip is a drip; wipe it with a rag and it’s gone.  But wipe it with your finger and you’ve smudged it all over something you didn’t want.  Also the rag is good for smacking cobwebs and brushing dust away.  Don’t get junk in your brush, get it on the rag.

Last thing, read your paint labels.  I was working for a guy this week and went under the house to find all the 5 gallon buckets together and I just judged the colors to match.  What I didn’t know was that the interior and exterior were the same color, but different paints.  Also, the deck was being painted gray but the primer for everything else was also gray.  I made unlucky grabs both times: I painted the 24 foot siding with interior paint and primed the deck instead of painted it.  Oops.  But the wall needed two coats anyway and the deck is extra durable.  I hope Scott isn’t reading my how-to post this morning, or at least that he’s laughing.

Maybe this will help anybody who wants to get a paint job started this spring.  Of course you can really cut your time down: call me and we’ll pull up the family travel camper.

Now for that baby picture.

right beside

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Double post this morning, but I have a little song I just recorded.  It was written the other morning and I like to sing it in the mornings.  Everybody is sleeping and I go downstairs and play it softly.

Here’s my morning voice and laptop microphone, but heck that’s what my records sound like anyway:

right beside.mp3

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sleeping like a baby

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Ashley is a superwoman.  And before I continue, I should mention that the YMCA trainer DID come back with the baby – and thanks, Lauren, for mentioning that needed a follow up.

But Ashley has spent the night with a fussy, fussy, fussy baby.  FUSSY!!!

Even after we tried to establish a calming routine- almost a ritual.  We dim the lights, speak in calm tones, give him a warm bath and heat the room.  I lay out a new diaper, powder, and a clean onsie.  Ashley dries him and cuddles him for one last, big nurse for the night.  Then we lay out the plastic Mexican feed sack on the bed for waterproofing and cover it with blankets.

I’m already halfway out by now.  I’ve set up her station when she’ll get up later in the night: diapers, wipes, spit cloth (for baby), a glass of water,  and the computer set to podcasts in case she has to stay awake.

The baby comes down and Ashley does too.  Silence.  Semi darkness.  His breathing pattern speeds.  Then ah ah ah.  And a pause.  Even in the dark, I know the pause is for wrinkling up his face, bearing his gums, a deep breath, and…. “WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!”

But even worse than the blasting cries are the “eeeeeeeehhhhhhs” from way back in the throat.  They are cries without enough air.  Deep laments, a wounding at the inner level of the soul.  The vocal coach in me says, “Use your chest voice, don’t swallow the tone!”  The dad in me says, “Oh dear, we’re scaring him.”  The guy that has to get up and work says, “Somebody shut that damn thing off!!”

Ashley repeats her steps, all in various forms, for most of the night.  I tell her she’s being a good mom, then go back to sleep.  There’s not much else I can do except get my butt to work.  Sometimes I put my knuckle in his mouth to buy some time while Ashley gets ready.  Maybe that’s where we get the term “knuckle sandwich.”

She is being a good mom.  And this brings me to my day’s quandary.  There is a frequent saying that has lost its meaning.  It seems to me that if we should like to describe hysterics, mayhem, aggression, and depravity, then we need only utter the words:

“Sleeping like a baby.”

 

Jessica Wendt liked this post

the milk drunk goes to the YMCA

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Ashley and I had our first family outing at the YMCA just now.  She put the little guy in front of an EFX machine and it was only minutes until someone asked to hold him.  Curiously, Ashley watched one of the personal trainers walk off with our baby and she continued her workout.

I debated on taking Addair over to the free weights, just to give him an idea of what he can do when he is 12.  But then I figured, “Why not wait until he’s about 7?”  We get ahead of ourselves.

An old man and a little boy must have overheard Ashley talking to the trainer.

“Was that a newborn?” the little boy asked.

“She said he was five weeks.”

“Well is that a newborn?”

The old man stalled.  ”No, I think a newborn is two weeks.”

Do people just make up answers to tell children?  Maybe the old man was right.  I’d like to know what is definitionally newborn.  I guess I could Google it in another window, but I’m not going to.

Lauren Watson liked this post

playing the piano in church

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From the view out of the batter’s box, I always looked up to the pitcher’s mound and feared I was the lesser man.  In this battle we engaged, his leading the field of play, I worried that he was craftier or stronger, or that the people watching me would be better served if this over with faster.  It was no strange occurrence for me to watch three gut strikes, then go sit back down, politely and unshaken.

My father worked with me until my hitting mechanics were fluid and pristine.  I lifted weights religiously to bulk up.  On a windy enough day in the 7th grade I could send a ball out of the yard, the full 355′ of Elmer Kelley Stadium.  But only if I were facing a pitching machine or the coach.  I made the high school Junior Varsity though I never swung the bat against a live arm.  It was a temperament problem.  My instincts were to not get hit by an 80mph projectile, to get the situation over, and to disappear into reflection.  Returning to my seat in the dugout I would wonder what was wrong with me, but I liked baseball even if I had to play it.  I was what you call: a kid.

With the high school season midway, it became common for me to need to do something else at home and not think about baseball.  I don’t remember all the things I probably tried first but I eventually found myself at my mother’s piano, and determined to learn Scott Joplin’s Maple Leaf Rag.  I’d had three piano teachers growing up, and each one had told my mother the same thing,  ”He could be a fine pianist if he’d decide to be.  But if you can’t make him practice, he shouldn’t continue coming.”

Maple Leaf Rag was a bit ambitious, but it was the reach I was needing.  As children go through well meant activities it takes their own decision if something is to stay.

We were raised in church.  A great big Southern Gospel Church by the interstate, a hunter green metal building you could see for miles.  Around my age the boys stopped running around the gym and were supposed to sit through youth group called “Powerhouse” with the older kids.  There was a band, but Ms. Teresa from big church had to be our piano player.  This was around 1995, and just before the acoustic guitar contemporary church music fashion broke into Kentucky.  We were a gospel church and that meant piano driven, definitionally.  Ms. Teresa was a famous member of The Childress Family, a touring/recording gospel group known everywhere.  Her daughter was a singer and she came over to lead the band: Ms. Teresa, a high school drummer and likewise, a bassist.

To describe how Ms. Teresa plays is tricky.  That kind of music is in the old keys we don’t use anymore: Eb, Ab, and Bb.  When pianists ruled, before Chris Tomlin and his gang, everything was like this.  There was swing, and every word needed it’s own chord.  There were three chord turnarounds and intros to be learned separately.  Most songs included one key change at least, and if an acoustic guitar player had even tried to find a strum pattern he would have just clustered things up and gotten a dirty look from Ms. Teresa.

In big church Mr. Smith played the Hammond C3 right beside Ms. Teresa.  Chip had a set of cherry red Tama drums with fifteen pieces.  Harvey Jett played lead guitar having long ago retired from Black Oak Arkansas in the 70s.  He would walk out to the podium, stand on the carpet with the white dove and point his Stratocaster to the sky.  The choir would raise their hands, Mr. Smith would bring the rotor speed to a boil, and Ms. Teresa would drop the funkiest chord walking you ever heard.  We had church, and that’s just how I was raised.

I wasn’t sure I wanted to go to Powerhouse just yet.  My  comrades and I would come in sweaty from our basketball and look around, mostly at high school girls.  Once when nobody was looking I sat down and played the piano.  Usually everything I knew, the Maple Leaf Rag.  The youth pastor heard me and after that I was a marked man.

Church people eat afterwards, as you know, and once I sat near Ms. Teresa herself.  I had been watching her for some time, really I’d watched all church musicians for as long as I could remember.  My mom grew up playing the piano in a little country Baptist Church and I woke up to the old hymns every Saturday.  She could remember only five of them but she had learned them once as big and full as they had ever been played.  Bigger perhaps, than the Maple Leaf Rag itself.

Ms. Teresa told me that if I were serious she would teach me.  I told her I’d been playing since I was six, I could read music, and I’d had three teachers.  Every one in town in fact, except for Mrs. Myrtle.   I had no interest in recitals, I wanted to play by ear and I wanted to play with the band.

The timing of this coincided with further confusion in my athletic development.  Going into the eight grade, certain expectations are placed on a baseball player.  One of them is swinging the bat.  I played baseball through the afternoon hours until dark.  I’d come home and bang out the chord charts Ms. Teresa had written for me.  Every little improvisation she played, I asked her to write in pencil.  She would never play it twice the same but she had to freeze something in order to teach me.  Most of the chords were spelled out too.  The basic ones I memorized and she continuously explained the relationships, even drew the circles in my notebook.  For something like an Ab 7 #9/ Eb, she would write it out note for note.  I didn’t know what it meant or why it worked but my fingers learned it like anything else.  My binder of songs grew and I meticulously studied her.  I would hold chords and look at them, change them, figure out what what they were doing.  If I moved a finger to an unplayed note and it worked, I remembered that.  If she wrote something in pencil on one song that worked on another, I’d do that.  I played before I went to school in the mornings.  I went in the band room between classes.

Then Ms. Teresa said I was ready to play on stage far far far before I knew that it was true.  Years before it was true.  I wouldn’t be ready until I were at least her age, or not until I could swing the bat at least.

Truthfully, I couldn’t play for the service as soon as she asked me too.  Her method was the worst possible scenario that an insecure, adolescent boy trying to make his way into the realm of teenage acceptance could imagine:  She sat on the end of the piano bench with me.  And when I messed up and froze, which happened often-  she scooted me off.  I’d sit there with my hands in my lap, my side to the kids, and she would lead the band back to the beginning of a verse and give it me again.  Nothing would be more relieving.  Sitting there was the worst.  And so, I learned that playing the fire out of the piano was the only way to not be scooted off, or having my pants pulled down.  I could mess up but I wouldn’t let her know.  I never stopped.  She could scold me later, but she wasn’t going to kick me off.  Then Ms. Teresa left and went back to big church.

I remember, oh I remember, the prayers I would utter from the seat during the pastor’s sermons.  He would always give an alter call and I had to go back up there alone.  I’d pray for God to give the man more words to say.  I would will him, even look at him intently to encourage him: just don’t make me come up there yet.  I’m not ready.  The big kids, cool kids, pretty girls and even guys on the baseball team would see me.  The sound guy would give me a reassuring nod.  I’d double check the first chord and lay it down like a baby.  The silence would break.  Once it was broken I had to play.  And when you want to hide, the more you will play.

No child knows what they want to do.  They only go with what they already do, and slowly events unfold and the world goes around a little and a lot of small choices can mean more than the big decisions sometimes.  By the time I was 15 I broke my leg and spent my freshman year in a wheelchair and then on crutches.  This had been remarkably bad for baseball and better for piano.  We switched churches later and my role as the piano player changed.  I was behind the blasted acoustic guitar and learning those finger fallacies of easy guitar chords- hell to piano players.  I didn’t need my flats anymore or my #5b7 turnaround chords.  For a while I tried to outdrive them but it couldn’t be done.  They had volume knobs.  Soon I resorted to organs and other gizmos invented by piano players trying to cope with the world around them: the modern keyboard.

I bought, traded and sold keyboards like baseball cards until recently.  Now there is an old upright piano against the wall that was headed to the dump.  There’s a box of my old CDs on top of it.  I don’t even play the thing hardly, and most often I pick up my pawn shop Conrad acoustic instead.  Somewhere down the road I joined the blasted club of them.  I guess it’s been about 16 years since I started with Ms. Teresa.  Maybe 23 years since my first piano recital.  I’m a pretty good piano player if anybody’s asking, but I would hope for that by now or something has gone terribly wrong.  A lot of little decisions have gotten me here, trying to make a living off the thing and not even feeling like looking at it most times.  Probably because it’s been such a frustrating go of things and I sometimes wish I’d worked out algebra problems after baseball practice.

I played at church again last night and I haven’t done so since the baby was born.  It felt good, felt right.  I still hide behind the piano, that’s my way.  I know I can make it do anything I want and that’s the best way to hide.  I sing sometimes and that puts me out there on the edge of the seat.  No since in hiding if you’re going to stick your head up at the same time.  I like to write words, and since I play music, songwriting has always had a natural gravitation.  I still have the temperament problem and it’s funny I would choose show business.  I don’t feel like I chose it, I couldn’t have, and that’s the mystery I must sort out.  I’m not of the opinion that the arts, the manual arts, the sciences, the entrepreneurs or the collars of any kind are really any different in their own minds.  We choose a little at a time, and we get where we’ve overall chosen to be.  I guess I wanted to be here with my big, red, solid 500lb struggle of ivory and metal.  Not only with it, but in seclusion with it, up at all hours of the night mixed up in the subtleties of life with it.  If I wanted the lights, truly I suppose I’d have them, but I have the daylight coming up now and that’s the one I want.  I put life to sound, my nature in these notes, beds deep and black, I was made to do this, and if we are instruments at all then we should be grateful for our use no matter what we see it as being.  I am a D flat, thank you for tapping me on the head today.  I will be patient and wait until you need me again, realizing that sometimes I could be the wrong note altogether and other times the note that would make all the difference.

daddy's boy

 

 

 

timshel

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The last few days have been a tear of reading.  A few days ago I noted Steinbeck’s East of Eden on my friends kitchen table.  I remembered that I had been getting to it, decided promptly, went to the library, and sat down to become involved.   All week I read.  I got up early to read and came home to sit and read.  I read as I bounced a fussy baby, read as I held a sleeping baby, and read as Ashley was mad at me for reading.  We read all Friday night.  I spent today, Saturday, walking around a million unfinished house projects with the book on my nose, countless trips to the coffee kettle, and breaks to add wood and process (like a baby moving his eyes from you to stare at a wall).

Having finished the book I feel like I am on the other side of something, which is the way any great book should make one feel.  I’m holding little Addair now as I write.  It isn’t going so well.  He doesn’t seem to have the attention span yet for blogging and I need to be more entertaining.   But I can’t help to think about the book and look at the wobbly ball of him.  He is what there is of me, he knows me, he will one day see himself apart from me and make his estimates of me.

As for now, I can’t get him to stop screaming and his mother needs a nap.  We are standing here bouncing in front of the computer on the table.  These nice reflections will have to wait until later.

zeal without knowledge

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“It is not good to have zeal without knowledge, nor to be hasty and miss the way.”    Proverbs 19:2

This was how the morning started, reading my daily Proverb (31 days, 31 chapters), and looking out at a cold morning as I built up the woodstove.  I made coffee and watched my fire flicker as daylight followed.  In hopes that I would paint later, I deemed it reasonable to open East of Eden and sit in idleness over a couple bowls of Raisin Bran.  Then when the morning was late enough I asked about my paint job.  We decided to wait out the cold, hanging sheetrock and hardy board in a bathroom down the street instead.

It never warmed, and with two other guys I spent the day in the john. These men I respect greatly and I’m ever watchful to be learning as much as I can.  Then it started truly smelling like a bathroom and nobody would take the blame.  I was starting to get mad, party because my denials were making be look guilty and mostly because it smelled  worse and worse- bad enough to make you mad.  Finally we realized it was the dog; and there was evidence, and that evidence had been sucked into the central heat which had then cooked it and filled the house with the new concentrate.  Man it was bad.  Then we went outside and ate leftover chocolate pudding pie that smeared everywhere as we mixed a sloppy layer of thinset on a piece of hardy board.  Scott said it was all a “bad run of things” which was a pretty good pun, and furthermore I’m not sure why I ran off with this story either.

Then I came home and good friends had been over to help Ashley and the baby and the house.  Our dishes were done, laundry on the lines, and a meal on the counter.  Ashley had been near enough to taking a nap during the afternoon that she had what appeared to be zeal as we got out the notebook and began to sketch out a plan for the Spring, our new life as a family of three artists in a camper, most preferably an Airstream, and yes the little man is an artist- an abstract diaper expressionist.

We had already said tentatively that when our tulip bulbs bloom we’d put the house on the market.  Of course there’s more to a good plan than that.  We don’t want to make haste, we don’t want to step without knowledge.  We also don’t want to dwindle away more days in a limbo of indecision.  Putting everything off to be decided by flowers is nice poetry, but less than a good plan.

We scratched a lot of zeal into the notebook.  Mostly about what we want to be doing, why it is so, and what it could look like.  Having a baby is a good time to reevaluate such things.   We are clear from our past about what we don’t want things to look like: waving people off to work in the morning as we sit on their couch and write songs until they come home.  Bob Dylan did that, but he was Bob Dylan.  And I’m told he did the dishes.

What we arrived at: we don’t want to ever oblige and we don’t want to ever end up stranded at a Walmart (who lets you camp for free if you didn’t know that).  That being said, I’m planning on becoming a migratory handyman with a truck full of saws, brushes, and tools.  We are under no impression that we can pay our way solely by the marketing of art.  This we have examined for the last five years and I remember we once excused ourselves from the couch and wound up moving into a weekly motel full of transients, taking our meals at soup kitchens, only I would bring bruised bananas and stale bagels home to Ashley because she wouldn’t go and finally we just lived out of the car.  Then we sold two paintings and got bus tickets to Mexico.  You have your ups and downs.

We negotiated big decisions.  What kind of space we’d require.  Where we would go.  How we’d make it.  It’s a big plan.  And the biggest commitment of all: sell the house, which is everything we have.

I love this place.  I still have dreams for it.  It could be a zillion things.  There is no other old grocery store/ house in a quirky, historic neighborhood like it.  I’ve remodeled every inch.  I know every patch of hill on every street around it.  Every block of sidewalk.  Most every neighbor.  I’ve fed myself from the little piece of yard.  It’s into me.  It’ll be a good bye and a hard cry when that day comes.

Why would we do it?  I have no idea.  I’ve about sat here and talked myself out of everything.  And I was going to write about using zeal to make good preparations.  But there is the notebook full of ideas.  It’s full of new songs, too.  And the next time I get on the road, I am sure that I will want to keep going.  And when I am looking at the fire, as I am right now, I am restless.

 

 

working days, excitement about a new found work of Steinbeck

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When Ashley and I loaded up and headed for the artistic promise land, I heavily relied on The Grapes of Wrath as a source of determination and hope.  And also as an answer when the day of reality and hard facts was laid out flatly before us.  Throughout our scrambles since, whatever mused Steinbeck we have felt it too.  A belief in an invisible justice for those who will put it on the line.  It may not happen, though it likely could have, and it arguably should have if fate shared our system of values or saw the situation as we do.  Now my foggy memory of working for the bank is told to me in Steinbeck, for I was the hired man bulldozing the house as the family watched.  No man does these things, but the corporate of them will.  And when our things were loaded into a truck we went off with them, hanging on to nothing but a hope and a good reason to go.  Leaving everything behind, wanting everything still to be ahead of us again.

A confession: I am perpetually fact checking on people I admire.  I call it “wiki-stalking.”  How old was Elton John when he made his first record?  What was his socioeconomic status?  How long did he fail miserably?  I try and figure out exactly what his cards were, and how it happened for him (and not just Elton but Billy Joel, too).  Was it a personal attribute, talent, luck or disposition (such mysteries as the case of Justin Timberlake)?  Usually it’s a little of all of it.  I’ve read Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers about how success, outlandish success, is as much linked to factors outside an individual as it is to their own talent.  Or how about some John Maxwell for you?, Talent is Never Enough.  Certainly better than all of it though, is Steinbeck.  What has makes a great and lasting story is that:

“A great and lasting story is about everyone or it will not last.  If a story is not about a hearer he will not listen.  The strange and foreign is not interesting- only the deeply personal and familiar .”

(quoted from East of Eden)

Success-obsession neglects the total value of our losses, battles, lessons, loves, victories and endurances.  Some might look at the difference at their beginning and their peak.  Others by what they were able to give back.  Net worth is the black and white of it.  Influence is the seeping rest of it.  Everything can work out easily if you don’t ask for much.  The asking alone might be one’s success or another’s regret.    Some would ask for the whole world, never get it, but look back with fondness at when they saw themselves close or making a pure effort.  To him a good toss and a miss for the moon is more satisfactory than spitting at his foot and winning.

From East of Eden:

“It takes great courage to back truth unacceptable to our times.  There’s a punishment for it, and it’s usually crucifixion.”

I found a detailed Chronology of Steinbeck in the back of my library copy of East of Eden.  Of course then, I fell into a similar state of “wiki-stalking”  Steinbeck.  I found him 36 and only moderately successful in his attempts to be a writer.  He’d been commissioned to write articles about the situation of migrant workers leaving the Dust Bowl for California.  After a few failed attempts he set aside 100 days to write the manuscript from those articles that would become The Grapes of Wrath.  The Chronology also mentioned that he kept a journal of these 100 days that was posthumously published as Working Days, the journals of The Grapes of Wrath.

Today at a used book store I found a copy of Working Days.  It’s sitting in front of me, for I’m now in the middle of East of Eden.  Maybe the journal is a window into the pre-epic Steinbeck: his determination, inspiration, and self doubt.  I want to read the coffee break gibberish as he balanced his story and built the characters of the novel.  I hope that it accounts for the struggle behind art.  Maybe it gives some kind of clue to a creative process which no one knew.  The voice that speaks into the wind over the dustbowl, what does it say about a good word-count goal on a Tuesday?  Did his wife go get groceries or did he need to get out of the house for a while?  The man really wrote the story, we have it on our shelves.

It seems like reading something such as this could be to reach out and touch it.  Maybe then, after reading such candid, naked thought, then I the hearer could read the familiar.  Then be encouraged.  Maybe there is no great novel or song in me, but there can at least be a reach for one.  Until I am given control of fate, the best chance I have is to keep my reaching in tact.

Spring of 2009

bad days with kids are really bad days, and remembering your dog after children

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“Bad days with kids are the worst days of all,”

That’s what the banjo player in my friend’s band just told me.  The banjo player, his wife, and their two small children were flying from Nashville to Portland with a layover in the middle somewhere.  I would agree with him that flying with kids is already a difficult agenda, possibly a sure-thing-bad-day.  So they were all running through the airport and the starving kids had to eat something.  The family got pizza and practically had to shove it in their little faces.  On the plane the little girl spit up and the wife handed her to the banjo player.  In his words, she then “man barfed” about five times in his face.  He couldn’t even hold her far away because of the seats, he just turned his head and took it like a dad.  All over the place.

Two nights ago Addair was wailing in hunger and fussiness during the middle of the night.  Before Ashley could get him eating she decided that she would change his wet diaper.  The kid was screaming and she had him up by the feet in the pitch dark.  He proceeded to pee over his head, sort of like a soccer player, and the new diaper was soiled as she deflected the spout onto the sheets around us.

Now, my dog is having his own issues with the child.  He had gotten up from the foot of the bed and was down at my side, probably hoping that he and I could just leave and be back to the way it used to be.  Ashley firmly handed the dirty diaper to me and said “TAKE IT.”  I harshly swung myself out of bed, swinging my hand with the loaded diaper, and smacked my dog directly in the face.  He screeched and ran away, hurt.  Ashley was trying to get the screaming baby to her chest, both of them lying in pee, and her other hand slapping the bed as hard as she could with her open palm.

I put my feet on the floor and sat at the foot of the bed, confused at my life.  Then I got up and changed the sheets.  The baby stopped crying.  I put the diaper in the trash.  My dog came to me and I patted him on the head.

“You’re a good boy,” I said, remembering what my Uncle David told me just the other day.  ”Don’t forget your dog, now.  He depends on you.”

Ashley nursed the baby and I lay back beside her, the dog stretching out between us.  I scratched his belly until we all fell asleep.

 

 

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first baby pictures of the week, a toy box, and a side story about Ashley

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I’d like to share some things that I got Addair over the weekend while my Dad and I did some shopping.  I’ve started him a little toy box.

Of course we have the regular toys, piles of them.  But since we are soon to be living in an Airstream travel trailer we are stream-lining down to the essentials.  This compass is new, as is the knife.  As old as he, may they hold him straight and cut true.  The rock is a piece of amber I bought from a little girl on the streets of Semijovel in Chiapas.  The racecar was found in our yard, a token of the dirt, from before our home was a vessel gleaming in the Walmart parking lot while Daddy tries to busk up some lunch money.

And although he is very excited, he seems to wonder “What else ya got?”

Can you believe the pot belly on this kid?  He looks like Pappaw.

Yup, that’s cute.

This is my mom.  She brought me into this world, and when I saw Ashley do that for Addair it was an experience that I’d be sitting here for a while to try and explain.  My appreciation for my mother has soared.  Actually I was so overcome in those moments afterward that I looked around at each human in the room and was grateful for their mothers too, wherever they might be.

I was just reminded today about a little side story.  One time about a year ago we were running a little low on cash.  It was a fluke occurrence, but anyways, I’d gotten some work on a construction site and the guy was still really low on hands after my first day.  I told him I knew someone dependable, really good with measurements and making cuts, plus they could ride with me tomorrow.  So I brought Ashley the next day.

The entire job was being run by barely skilled college guys who were off for the summer and I knew that Ashley likely had more experience than all of them.   She and I were hanging wood paneling for the restrooms when the boss man brought me to the side and asked, “How’s she doing?  I mean, like, …as good as….” and he looked for his wording, “….anybody else?”

Better, I thought.  But I said yes, disappointed that he had committed his most blunderous error (he had immediately commented on her fashionable red workboots.  They were real boots, only red).  Most importantly, if you need to talk to someone working for YOU, then talk to THEM, and not their husband.

She kind of lost her cool after that.  I took the nail gun from her.  At the end of the day I told him he’d better go ahead and pay us.

Today Ashley walked to the site in the neighborhood where my crew was working and got my truck keys.  She had the baby, and I was remembering as she left about the story I just told you.  She had on a dress, some fancy boots and she looked foreign amidst the assortment of things one is used to seeing on a construction site.  It’s not that things there are dirty, but they are perpetually in an unfinished state.

Here she was all pretty and ready to go.  And I’ll tell you one thing.  As big and bad as any man can feel as he hammers and cuts and measures with precision, a woman with a baby on her hip is badder than them all.  I’ve seen it.  I tip my hat, and I will never forget it.  She can wear the boots she likes, and she can co-captain my Airstream any day.

And to anyone reading this who has ever been born, you should remember to thank as many mothers as you can.  Thanks mom.

weeks and weeks ago (like 3)

 

 

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