this ones for you, hardworker

This is Tom

This is Tom's Mural

Tom stepped outside the fence, pushing his paint cart in front of him.  I stepped up to speak to him.
As my own stomach was grumbling, I asked Tom if he was going for lunch:
it's hard to work when you're hungry, I offered.
yehap...and it's a whole lot easier when you ain't, he countered. 
This is also the very beginning, the very first shots, of what I hope to be the documentation of Tom and his ever-growing mural.  He reckons it'll take him til the end of this summer.  Or maybe a year later from the end of this coming summer.  I wasn't quite sure.  Even though we talked about it twice in the half hour or so of our first meeting.

Tom lives across the street from this little private garden where there used to be another "rahlly, rahlly beautiful mural" in this same spot.  But, it got tagged and the garden manager painted over the tagging, which left a kind of raggy mural, until Tom got involved.  There is one little memento left over from the last mural, it's a tiny little animal "that moves rahlly, rahlly slow" over in the corner.  Neither of us could quite come up with the name of that slow moving animal, but I guessed an Iguana.  Next time I go to visit Tom and his mural, I plan to take a close-up of that little thing.

I didn't want to overbear, or get too excited about my Tom & his mural discovery.  I've done that before with people and they get camera shy or the story telling dries up 'cuz they feel like you're watching 'em too close.  So, I played it cool and took it nice and easy.

It wasn't until he got into the far and wide details of how this mural will grow over time that I turned to him and said, well, Tom,  i better get a photo of this process.  dontcha think?   He had told me, though he only works on it about an hour a day (when the weather is good), he wants it to always feel like it's done, in a way.  When I mentioned a 'before' and 'after' kind of documentation, he said, well, i don't like to think of it as before and after...'cuz it's always happening.  We agreed we should call it a 'during' photo.

I told him I'd come looking for him again when the sun is out and I hoped I'd be able to take another photo.  He pushed his paint cart away and said he'd be pleased if I did so.