Painting Red

Big year for nuts and the squirrels are chattering at a furious rate. All along Mackletree they do their suicide indecision, counted seven dead in a two mile stretch, stopped and flipped them off the road. Pea soup fog this morning, thick along the river road. Clay going it alone to Massillon, so I can paint the entry and signage walls, tape, cut, roll; ther color is Pittsburg 233-7 Gumball Red, and it is too. The signage wall is hot pink so I should get it to cover in two coats but the entry wall is pastel green and I assume it will be problematic. Right on both counts. Paint for six hours and still have to put a third coat on the entry. Red paint is so high in solids that it goes on streaky and the roller wants to pull paint off the walls at the end of a stroke. Still, with yellow vinyl lettering, it's just right for the Circus Show. Going blind today, painting red over pink (somehow creating purple halos wherever I looked), and the red reminded of the first red Moroccan goatskin I used to bind a full-leather book. Almost too supple, I had to size it with glue water to stiffen it enough for my purposes. Mom was still making costumes for strippers then, and I had taken a small piece of the unsized over to show her. I drove her on her appointed rounds, fittings and deliveries, usually took a book and had a free beer at the bar. The girls would come out and model their new costumes for me. They loved the leather, I knew they would, had brought the sample along. I got Mom a lovely hide for $50 and she made $500 worth of skimpy g-strings out of it. Excellent business. She'd let her very favorite girls come out to the house, usually for a rush costume and once, I must have been a Junior in college, I'd had a few people out from school, we were doing a play together, for dinner and a read-through, and this beautiful woman, Amber, knocked on the door; Mom had sewn her a lovely American flag outfit, with stars over her breasts. I let her in, ushered her upstairs, went back to the reading, a few minutes later Mom stuck her head around the corner, said, Son, can you come up here. Amber had on the new outfit and it was stunning, yes, I said to them both, yes, it was perfect for a gathering of politicians (which was the gig), and that was that, but a while later, when Amber had redressed demurely in slacks and a silk blouse, she came over to the dining room table where we were reading, pecked me on the cheek, said thank you love and left. The rest of the cast looked at me. They wanted me to check the fit, I said, she's a stripper. I could hear Mom laughing upstairs, I'd been played. This a thread, in my upbringing, to learn by example, my father is a lousy teacher when it comes to explication, but he knows things, and shows them really well. You don't need a textbook when the example is right in front of you. I can make a handle for that. Once I understand the function I can probably build a better handle. I've been studying handles. Kim does handles better than anyone I know, but I occasionally wonder what is he thinking? I need him to do a two step, cast-iron stairway to nowhere. Two steps, man, leave the rest to me. My specialty is making sense out of nothing. Perfect, it's just me. It's just me, I wouldn't trust anything further.