time well spent with friends
It was a hot, humid afternoon some 25 years ago, and I was perched precariously on the roof atop a two-story house (with basement and attic, no less) on Hanover Avenue.
With a two-and-a-half inch sash brush in hand and a gallon bucket dangling from the sill of a dormer, I was attempting to paint trim and mullion before the height and tenuousness of the operation got the best of me.
Crazy, you say.
Yeah, that’s what I thought at the time, and that’s exactly what I’m thinking now, but it was all for a good cause.
You see, back in those days, my colleague Joel Nuckols and 1985 Collegiate graduate and future colleague Michael Brost ran a summer painting business, and when we agreed to spruce up someone’s home, we agreed to do the tricky stuff as well as the areas that were easy to reach.
This endeavor seemed to defy good sense, however.
To reach our target, we extended our 32-foot ladder as high as it would go and leaned it against the edge of the roof.
Michael stood on the bottom rung to anchor it.
Joel climbed almost to the top with an 8-foot section of another ladder slung over his shoulder, placed it along the precipitous slope, and used gravity and his strength to secure it there.
My deal was to climb out the attic window and step onto the short ladder without falling from a height that would make an Olympic 10-meter diver squeamish.
All the while, XL102 blared from the radio.
Several neighborhood kids – ants from my vantage point – watched intently.
Sweat poured from my body.
At long last, we completed our mission, and when I finally returned to ground level, I vowed never to do the Karl Wallenda thing again, but in short order, I was back on the high ladder.
In fact, each of us took his turn, knowing full well that the others had his back if the situation became dicey.
That’s the essence of teamwork and friendship.
That was what made the painting experience so meaningful and memorable.
One day recently, Joel, Michael, and I sat down for an hour or so and relived the good ol’ days.
As we reminisced, we might have exaggerated a story or two, but, bottom line, we had some adventures that no degree of hyperbole could make wilder than they were.
Our former colleague Jerry Shields, who by that time lived overseas, owned several rental properties around Richmond and occasionally hired us to paint them.
One house, on Floyd Avenue near the VCU campus, forced us to use all the ingenuity we could muster.
“We worked in a narrow alley,” Joel recalled. “There was a cornice and a couple of windows we had to paint.
“We had to set the ladder pretty much straight up so the building next door supported the foot of the ladder.”
Somehow, we completed the tedious job of scraping, sanding, and painting without incident, then repaired to the 7-11 across the street for a Big Gulp and candy bar, our summer staples.
Michael picks up the story.
“Somebody came up to you,” he said to Joel, “and asked, ‘Your brother doing OK?’
“You said, ‘Yeah, he’s doing fine.’
“So he walked away, and Weldon said, ‘I didn’t know you had a brother.’
“And you said, ‘I don’t. I have no idea who that guy was.’”
There was much laughing, then and now.
One summer, Eva Boswell, Joel’s wife’s grandmother, commissioned us to paint her house near the intersection of River and Ridge.
We arrived the first morning and found dew still on the ground and the front gutter clogged.
Joel climbed onto the roof, gingerly walked a few steps tossing handfuls of leaves into the yard, then began to slip because the soles of his tattered, paint-covered running shoes were wet.
Seemingly unfazed, he leaned into the roof, continued his descent, momentarily grabbed the gutter to brake his fall, and dropped into the shrubbery between Michael’s ladder and mine.
“It was a slate roof,” he recalled after we had another good laugh. “One side had a lot of moss on it, and I’d always forget about it.
“It was about the third time I fell off that roof. Every time, I swore I’d never get on it again.”
I could go on and on about the times we put the tall ladder in the back of a pickup so we could reach the peak of a roof, sometimes using a brush duct-taped to an extension pole.
Or we tangled with bees or wasps or came face-to-face with bats lurking in the eaves.
Or we painted what’s now Collegiate’s business office and repaired a broken upstairs shutter by caulking in a paint paddle.
Or we joked that the epitaph on our tombstones would be, “This is not a step,” the admonition atop every stepladder.
Or Joel brushed a coat of Benjamin Moore’s Stormy Petrel onto his dilapidated Ford Granada, whose rear-view mirror was held in place with caulk.
But that’s enough for now.
I miss those summers, mainly because it was time well spent with friends.
At the end of a long, hot day, isn’t that what really matters most?
