astronaut – A Hundred Houses

While I was drawing this, the man from the house behind where I was sitting came out to ask what I was doing.
‘Drawing,’ I told him, taking my earbuds* out and smiling up at him, ‘I go around the place drawing pictures.’
I asked him if he had an issue with me sitting in his gutter and he said no.
The man didn’t seem to have much more to say to me, so he didn’t say anything, just goodbye and went inside.
An hour or so later the man came outside again and called to a man who was arriving in a pickup truck.
‘I’ll move my car out of the driveway and you can put it in here.’ he said to the man in the pick up.
Then the man reversed his car out of the driveway, all the way across the street, and parked right in front of the house I was drawing.
I watched him for a minute or so, thinking he would drive forward, considering that he knew I was there drawing the house.
But he didn’t.
Instead he got out of his car, locked it, and walked across the street toward me.
‘I’m going to have a bit of difficulty finishing my drawing now that you’ve parked your car there,’ I said, in a light-hearted jokey way, thinking that he would probably slap his head and say ‘Oops, sorry about that’ and trot back across the road to move his car.
But he didn’t.
Instead, he walked straight toward me, and as he passed he said- Sorry, I’ve got the electrician here and I didn’t plan on you being here this morning.’
I didn’t know what to say to that, so I just stared at the man’s car: a dark coloured SUV- type thing, which now obscured the house from the driveway to the start of the living room window.
After a few minutes I felt myself get angry, and I was just deciding that I would get my revenge by posting the man’s house and street number in this story, when a woman came out of the house with some keys in her hand and said, quietly and sweetly: ‘Would you like me to move my husband’s car?’
I smiled at her and said yes, and she crossed the street and reversed the car so that I had an almost full view of the house again.
Then the woman, who was wearing shorts and a grey tshirt with the word ‘Hawaii’ across the front, crossed the street again and began talking to me.
Firstly she apologized for her husband, and I told her I understood: that he was most likely stressed because he had an issue in the house as he had an electrician in.
Then she asked me where I was from and I told her I was Australian, but that I had lived in the UK for many years, and she told me that she had always wanted to go to Australia, but had never had the chance.
‘And I love your accent.’ she told me.
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘Everybody does. I could get away with murder with this accent.
Then the woman told me how much she liked my drawing and asked me what medium it was.
‘Pastel.’ I said, and then I told her of my hundred house project and we talked for a while about drawing.
And then, when I asked if she drew, or painted she told me that she had once, but that now she didn’t have time for much as she was caring for her elderly mother who was very poorly.
‘I used to work as an Ayurvedic practitioner,’ she told me, ‘and alternative therapies, but I gave it up. Too much money and it became all about how much money we could get out of celebrity clients.’
Then she explained that she’d designed and planted the garden along the side of her house: a beautiful garden in well balanced muted tones that looked like it was planted for maximum water efficiency.
‘Are you a garden designer?’ I asked the woman, whose pixie haircut I was coveting, ‘Is that your job?’
‘No,’ she said, ‘I used to work for a company that designs, but I had to give it up because of my mum.’
Then we talked for a while about doing lots of different kinds of work, and I explained to that I had tattooed briefly for a living, that I had once been a creative director, that I had shuffled wallpaper rolls in a hardware store, and that the job I was doing now I had no real qualifications for.
‘Thing about the USA that I’ve learned,’ I said, ‘is you really can be whatever you want to be. You could get a business card printed saying you were anything, apart from an astronaut or a neurosurgeon and people would throw money at you.’
The woman thought for a moment, and then laughed.
‘Actually,’ I say, ‘with my accent they’d probably hand me a scalpel.’