Weathered brick, painted by the wind and rain, catches my eyes and I feel the warm hands that built that wall. I am taken back to days long ago when, as a child, mom took me inside those walls and pulled shirts from hangers and held them up to me. Mr. French points out the sale sign as mom thinks, “Can I make one cheaper?” Back on the hanger goes the shirt, mom asks for boys' trousers. Corduroy with buttons, no zipper. Two sizes too big and long, mom has them wrapped up. Classmates will get a good laugh when I go to school with cuffs rolled up and waist pinned back. Safety pins - I hated them. I have a hard enough time in school with my ears tape back.
French's Pants Shop long gone, I pause to look at what remains of the yellow lettering on the weathered bricks. Leaving Mr.French in his little shop, we turn west and turn in two doors down where mom heads straight to the scrap table. Bolts of material line the walls and all colors of thread fill racks. If there isn't enough material in the scraps for a long sleeve shirt, I will be getting a short sleeve shirt made at home. Mom pauses at the new electric Singer sewing machine. She has that same look I get in the dime store in front of the cap guns. I like pumping the foot pedal of her sewing machine and watching the needle go up and down. Spin the drive wheel and watch the thread race across the top spindles then down and around the shiny silver needle's arm. I could never figure out what it did underneath to keep it from coming back out when the needle came back up. Ada, now living over Mr. French's shop, barks at me from her fire escape telling me to get to work.
The sewing store is now the park below my studio window and my studio was once the Fox Theater. I pause before going in and remember those days of riding the bus to town and walking with mom and hoping she would stop at Favorhomes and buy me another toy cowboy. Those cowboys and their horses were all different and interchangeable. I was still playing with them when I was twenty. Only then I set them up in still-life setups. Mom must have used better tape on my left ear, my reflection in the window shows my right ear sticking out more. I pause again at the top of the stairs to look at other memories.
Time to get to work and focus on my painting of Ann's garden.
