SPRUCING AN OAK

Today #2 Son returned home from a triumphant tour of duty with a paintbrush. Having painted himself, his clothing including shoes, he walked in tall and proud! Witnessing such a scene throws me back to my early days as a housepainter. No, I wasn’t living in Vienna at the time, but I was working for a dictator in Dear Old Dad. Using a paintbrush and the then new fangled roller there was no object Dad would not paint, and if it stood still for too long, it too got painted. I always made it a point to whistle while I stood still so he knew I was not inanimate.

One of the lessons I learned from Dad was prepping for a paintjob. Learning this lesson required actual hands on experience with a broom, mop, rags and other cleaning devices and verbal instructions on how to carry on. Pop was a task-master, dictating every move, it’s sequence and strokes, minding movement of the grain, number of times and pressure to apply to each prep job.

To this very day I hate to paint. I would rather wall paper, or scrape my knuckles against concrete than paint a wall, especially with oil based paints that get into my system and causes me to have a respiratory ailment for a few days.

Whenever I see something being painted I think of Dad, whenever I paint I think: “Would Dad like the job I’m doing?”

Once many years ago in the mid to late sixty’s my sister Fran was expecting her boyfriend to visit the house for the first time, and Dad decided to spruce the place up. Taking out his can of white paint he started to touchup here and there, and found himself in the backyard. Fran was at the sink washing the dinner dishes and looking out the window to the back yard, when all of a sudden she started screaming: “MA, MAKE HIM STOP, MAKE HIM STOP!” Dear old Dad was painting or should I say sprucing up an old oak tree trunk in the color white. He must have seen it on the road where sometimes the town will paint a trunk of a tree to alert motorists of a bend in a road or some other visual reason. Poor Dad, I couldn’t figure out how high he was willing to go, and how many trees he was going to paint in the yard if we hadn’t stopped him..

All my married life I’ve done the painting with the help of TLW (The Little Woman), hiring a painter only once that I can remember, when I had the outside of my old house painted.

Well, I think I’ll go over to my Mom’s house, that tree is due for another coat.