IN 1972

We welded.........

a man with now truncated arms, using scrap steel from a junkyard, our endless supplier of material. He has a big and real copper heart. He smiles, thanks to the heat of the gas welding equipment. His pieces were formed by the gas cutting torch.

He stands welded to a farm disker plate.

He was painted a light green because we thought as the copper heart aged it would take on that approximate patina. But it never did. It stayed true to it's copper self through years of standing outside in the elements. The green-painted iron body has rusted, but not completely.

At first we had the originally longer armed man holding a stick spinning a recycled barbecue grill hoop, the way kids used to do, to see how long they could keep them running down the sidewalks before they wobbled and fell out of control.

Fraught with (now raccoon district) symbolism.

But eventually the forearms broke off and the grill was discarded. The man stood his posts in his various domiciles with nothing apparent to grin about. He lost his arms.

Then, recently we gave the man a reason to once more flaunt his talents, by bringing a rusty unicycle down from the garage rafters where it hung upside down on a hook, no longer played with by chidren. Leaning it up against the iron man it is a natural in this or any backyard.

The rugged smiling man needs no arms to ride a unicycle.

[This posting dedicated to John Tyson and Stew Tolbert]