I got a French mani/pedi this morning....never had one before, French that is. About seven years ago, Doug gave Mom and me gift certificates to a salon. We spent a wonderful afternoon getting pampered and primped. Mom got a French manicure that day. When we returned to my house, she decided something needed cleaned and had her hands in cleaning water for a couple of hours. The manicured nails were gone. I felt bad that she should sacrifice her lovely nails just to clean my house. I thought about that today, and decided I was going to be more selfish and careful. When I helped Doug up on the roof this afternoon, I wore gloves.
I mentioned in last night's blog that we're putting a steel roof on our house, and since it was windy today, I graduated from ground pounder to roofing holder. We have a section in the back of our house that has a pentagonal shape so it's a geometric nightmare for cutting the steel sections. To reduce the aggravation, I helped Doug carry up the saw houses and pieces of steel to our rooftop so he could do all the cutting right up on the roof. (Are you singing The Drifters' song yet? How about the scene from Footloose when Kevin Bacon, Lori Singer, Chris Penn, and Sarah Jessica Parker are in the car returning from dancing across the county line and they sing, "Up on the roof, oh, yeah, one hundred proof, oh yea"? I've been singing these songs all day!) So, I'm up on the roof holding the sheets of steel while Doug's cutting, sparks flying, and I suddenly remember the time that a steel bristle from a street sweeper got lodged in Dad's neck. He used to be the Aplington Street Superintendent and was working on the sweeper on a windy July day back in the early 1970's. Apparently a bristle broke loose, the wind caught it, and punctured a major artery.
We didn't have a doctor in town at the time so he was rushed to the nursing home where an RN applied pressure to get the bleeding under control until an ambulance could get him to the nearest hospital 30 miles away. Mom used to love to tell the story of how, after she had been notified by phone about Dad's accident, she went out the front door of the house to yell down the street for me to come home immediately. Apparently I was casually riding my new bike (actually it was a used one that Dad found at the city dump, but it was new to me) while Mom was frantically yelling for me to, "Hurry up!" The only other thing I remember from that day is entering the room at the nursing home where Dad was lying on a cot, and there was so much blood everywhere. I'd never seen that much blood, on the floor, on the walls, on Dad. But his face was as white as the paste glue I used in school. The three colors I most remember from that day are red and white and the blue of my city dump bike.
That's what I was thinking about up on the roof today while Doug was cutting steel. And that's what made me duck-down under the steel sheets as I held them in place so the wind wouldn't blow them away. Doug stopped the saw to ask what I was doing, and I told him the story about Dad and the street sweeper.
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