At six thirty five, after dinner, looking at the painting on my easel, the screws of the easel's left leg begin to loosen, and, as if a ship in a cartoon, the easel started listing. On it were the painting, the brushes, the paint and palette, the water container, and a rag, a caraval of art, my passengers on the deck of Art's Titanic, cadmium yellow medium and cobalt blue falling out of bed on the Andrea Doria, sliding like the grand piano on Fellini's Gloria N, sliding to the floor.

In the moment it took to get up from my chair, jump the ten steps to the easel, avert it's collapse, catch everything, hold it upright and level, adjust and tighten the screw, and put everything back together, I remembered my grandfather, who was both amused and annoyed as he watched me miss a 4d finishing nail, as I tried to hammer the nail into a half-foot 2x4 that would make a spar for the toy boat I was building. He told me, as he did often, firmly and gently: "Be about your business!", and kept at his own work, shoveling leaves and the refuse of a storm trying to drain the pool at the flooded gutters of the curb, a nuisance to him: the pool was the ocean to me. "Keep your eyes on the nail", he said.

I aimed the hammer and held the nail, hit it true on the head, sunk it deep, and split the board in two. "Now you have a catamaran", he said.

When the easel was secure I sat back down and remembered my studios, all of them, all at once, all the places where I'd drawn and painted in my life, from the living room floor where my father forbade painting, to my bedroom where I've always painted, in and out of classrooms from the age of 9, in a berry patch at Tyler Creek at 16, in the room at the east end of Chez Nobs with its view of the Dents du Midi, at Valley Vista where the lost Maniar Painting was painted and which Gennaro's truck delivered with love up Highway One, at the house where Tomato, and Miss Liberty and the
Encounter poster were made, and at the Goodman Building, and McAllister Street, and at Noe Street,the casa Eureka, the Radelleff's porch, the vast cave of the hardware store, the BMR bunkhouse, The Tranquil Cottage, The UpTown Club, the Calle puerta de Jaén in Martos, the patio at Fuengirola, and the garage in Redondo.

Now I'm painting in a screened porch. There are beams across the ceiling that remind me of the beams in my rooms last June in the Grand Hôtel in Cabourg. I listen to the wind rushing through the eucalyptus grove across the river. It becomes the rush of surf.

The landscape is gorgeous, I have a few paintings started. Two very fat quail run through the undergrowth in the morning, some kind of loon honks when the sun goes down.

I want to paint more people.