Category Archives: Life reflections

Memory Lane

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In Jack’s guest post he re-visits his earlier profession –

In the dim and distant past, when I left high school, I began serving my five-year long apprenticeship as a painter and decorator. I went on to work in that trade for many years, eventually teaching the skills in the local college where I had attended part-time as an apprentice. I look back on those days with fond memories and I’m still occasionally reminded of the satisfaction to be had from practicing a set of specialist skills competently.

So to this past weekend; after almost ten years, it was time to re-decorate what had been our upstairs sitting room and is now the main café area. The cozy and warm chestnut colored wallpaper that suited our life-style really didn’t work for a café and the woodwork was getting grubby and worn.

As I proceeded to strip the old wallpaper and prepare everything the memories came flooding back. When it came time to paint the ceiling and woodwork I remembered teaching the students a whole variety of brush skills – knowing what made a good brush, learning to work left or right handed, knowing just how heavily to load the brush with paint, applying the paint without any spattering or misses or runs etc. All this makes it easier, very satisfying and truly rewarding!

Hanging wallpaper is a different kind of challenge and not helped by the almost universal availability of the ‘ready-pasted’ kind. I really, really hate ready-pasted papers with a vengeance. If you use them as directed, you end up with water all over the floor and there’s never enough ‘slip’ to position the paper to match the pattern. So I just paste them anyway! But now it’s hard to find regular common or garden paste any more. So, for the first time in over fifty years I mixed a bucket of flour paste and got it right first time (something I took a while to learn as an apprentice).

As I only had a two-day window of time to complete the work, our good friend David drove over from NC and once again stepped into the breach and became my ‘apprentice’ for the weekend.

Our ‘best-of-the-best’ café manager and chef, Kelley, had popped in from time to time as the work progressed and her broad smile again brought back memories of satisfied customers. I finally made a point of checking with her customers as they sat down to lunch yesterday and they looked up just long enough from the best home-cooking in Wise County to give universal approval!

Enjoy the pictures and tell me what you think –

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1/3 Piece of Dry Toast

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sick dogI ate 1/3 of a piece of dry toast today. I might have eaten more, but our foster cat Butterscotch – the one who leads the charges and plots all the mischief – hopped up on the chair arm next to me as I sat in the bookstore with my meal. He spied the toast, gave me a bright smile of thanks, snatched it up in his mouth, and instigated a game of hockey with his foster brothers, Justin, Edgar, and Alfie. There was some complicated scoring mechanism by which they took bites at certain times, so the remaining toast was soon gone.

But it had done its work; it settled in and stayed put in my stomach, a place I had come to think of as similar to the Bad Marshes of Middle-Earth: gases everywhere, unsure footing leading to likely death; and an explosion could happen at any moment.

So I’m on the mend from the Virus of Voiding that seems to be making the rounds these days. Three nights of simultaneous toilet-and-sink hugging, my cheeks resting at each end on cold porcelain, hadn’t left much inside to expunge.

I am now determined to change my diet if I ever get back to eating real food. Our Good Chef Kelley has promised me vegan falafals. I may never touch caffeine again, after the withdrawal headache that exacerbated the first night of misery.

Who am I kidding? A life without Pal’s Tea wouldn’t be worth living. But speaking of misery upon misery, I really think it ought to be a law that one should not have to deal with poison ivy at the same time as the Voiding Virus. The cats have been going out in this warm weather, and apparently the favored spot of My Archenemy beneath our apple trees is going strong. I have poison ivy on my chin and neck, from where they gave me cat scans during my comatose illness state.

All the same, I’m on the mend. I am actually thinking about the future in a hopeful way: bookshelves to sort, pages to write, cats to foster. I may manage a whole piece of toast by supper–assuming I can hide it from Butters, of course. And someday soon, I will sip a cup of hot tea.

Soon. For now, though, I shall return to my bed and a book, and try to keep the cats from sleeping on my neck.

Slainte