I Grew Up Painting Bricks

I grew up painting bricks with water when I was younger; and, I learned to paint them with paint as I got older.  The practice of painting bricks with water began when I was five and six years old, waiting for my father to come home from work on Saturday. I was waiting for him to get done so he could take me fishing.  

The waiting was hard for me and so my father and mother devised a practice that would become a profession. It started with a Maxwell House coffee can, water, and a three inch wide brush. They would fill the can with water and tell me to go paint the brick wall on the side of the walkway up to the house.  

There was a wisdom in their prescription. By the time I would get to the end of the brick wall, the beginning of the brick wall would be dry and need water again. I would start all over again without skipping a beat.  So whether they planted an OCD pattern in me, or were simply maximizing on an OCD pattern they saw, I cannot be completely sure. But, I could not stop painting the wall with water.  It was a drive.

Later in life, when I was between careers, I had my own painting business for several years. I had painted a lot in the summer during high school and college days. But, just before our first son was born, I was painting houses in an historic borough in Bucks County, Pennsylvania - and all around the county.  It was what my father did for 30 years of his life.

Painting bricks with water was the first inkling I had that there is often a natural hunger built into the work we do. A hunger that would allow us to keep going, to keep doing, until we achieve what we set out to accomplish.  A hunger that sustains itself, even as we grow weary. Some would call it an obsession.  But I think they only do that because they fear the hunger. Those who understand the hunger do not need to call it an obsession at all.  They just listen to its urgings.

Hunger can root us in our daily lives and look like habit. The learned behavior that allows us to return to the same activities day after day after day.  This hunger drives communities as well as individuals. It moves history across time. It is responsible for all the great developments we love; the culture and art and science in living itself.

It is hunger that gets me out of bed in the morning.  That calls me to hike three miles before work.  It is hunger that helps me to overcome the difficulty of working with the dying - day in and day out. And what begins me to long for the sweet creams and crepes of sleep.

Hunger is the very pulse that moves all life forward; evolving into the next way we will be.  And the next after that.  I love that longing ache to move ahead and grow.  I am enchanted and haunted by that hunger.

Collaged Gelli mono-print accompanies piece