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37 degrees. I am dressed in ten top layers, jeans and sneakers. Gloves too, man-style leather ones, plastic ones in my pocket.
I made up my mix. I will confess to not really knowing how to do this. The books and websites just give ingredients, not actual measurements. It is very difficult to mix concrete, very heavy. I am just doing it in a big plastic work pan using a shovel to mix. I am freezing. My arms ache. My back aches. My shoes are wet. And I accidentally spray my jeans, jeans that have fallen down to the bottom of my ass. I can’t pull them up because I now have my plastic gloves on and they are full of concrete. I am working against time. The guy at the store said I have two hours, but I don’t know how long it will actually take me to apply the cement to the armature. Plop! Some of it is falling off, onto the tree, onto my shoes, onto the ground, covering up my perennials. Plop! Plop! Plop! I need a break. My fingers are so cold I am afraid I might get frostbite. Can you get frostbite if the temp is above 0 degrees?
Okay all warmed up. Back at it. Pants pulled up. I slip my hands back into the plastic gloves, which are covered with concrete. They are very cold. I should have done the underside first. Now I am rubbing against the “done” parts to get underneath. I am developing genuine respect for those men that work in concrete every day. (BTW concrete is the finished product, like a sidewalk; cement is an ingredient in concrete. I hope I am using the terms correctly here.)
The heat from my skin is drying out my jeans, but it doesn’t feel good. I am getting more confident. I see that smearing is working far better then simply trying to adhere a lump of the mix. It is going faster. Looking better, more accomplished, but don’t assume that this is in any way professional. It is not. Yet I am happy with my rustic results. I would be better on a warmer day, I tell myself.
There. All done. Now to cleanup. More water splashing everywhere as I clean out the pan and rinse off the shovel. Pants down again. I have lost too much weight recently during a water cure. Note to self…BUY BELTS not the fashion kind, the utilitarian kind! I tarped my leftover ingredients. All I am thinking of is how nice it would be to come home to a wife right now, a warm home, hopefully a smile awaiting me. Some soup would be nice. I walk in my door and strip off layers and layers. No wife waiting. I turn the shower on hot. My bones are cold. Stepping out of the shower, I snuggle on my white terry robe. In the kitchen I put on chicken soup, adding 3 cloves of garlic. My nose is stuffed up with cement! I think I was supposed to wear a mask. Next time.
Dusk has arrived. I sneak outside and peak. Everything is okay. The cement didn’t fall off. Tomorrow morning will be the real test. Fingers crossed.
Wives of those concrete men should be really nice to them. That is hard work! Very messy too. Just the warmness of you would be very inviting. If you are an office-worker guy reading this, don’t look down on the worker men. And don’t buy into that Hollywood stereotype of workers/truck drivers being redneck perverts. They aren’t. The ones I know are probably much smarter than you are. These guys have a big independent streak, they aren’t conformists like you. Wait, I don’t mean to make a blanket statement here. Like every profession, some are smart, some aren’t. Although I will say that in my experience the worker men are satisfied with a copy of Playboy, while the corporate men have, umm, let’s say, more dangerous tastes.
How did this get to be a rant topic? Sorry.
Notes:
* Sakcrete doesn’t work. I had a disastrous session last week. The mix had too many rocks in it and it wouldn’t stick to the vertical armature. I could not get it dry enough to make a “clay.” PLOP! Sakcrete is for sidewalks.
* Portland is perfect. Someone told me that it is imported from places like India. I wonder if that is true? I made my own mix…Portland cement, sand, and lime. An online site said the lime would help it set up, make it like a “clay” for sculptors. It worked.
* I made the armature out of wood wrapped in chicken wire, the kind with the smaller openings. First, I might go to a wire that is even smaller. Second, on my tree-walking dog I just formed the head out of wire. That doesn’t work. The mix just falls though. I waited for the mix to set up to a harder stage, still didn’t work. I had wired the copper-tubing tail in place, then covered it with duct tape. That works. So I did the same for the head. Voila!
* Tomorrow I am going to try to fill in those ears. Every concrete person tells me that won’t work. Because I will have created a cold joint. You are supposed to do the whole sculpture at once.
* Turn all of the wire ends in as far as possible. They will rip your gloves right off. Careful!
