"Old Paint and New"

OLD PAINT AND NEW

Retelling of a story from 2005

For about a year, Karen had been telling the kids (Olivia was 11, Kelty was 10) that she was going to paint their rooms—mostly, I believe, because she was disgusted by the sight of their walls. Pockmarked and scratched, pin-holed and dinged, they had the “rough-hewn” appearance of an old cabin interior in the early stages of vandalism. One of the most prominent markings in each of the rooms (which straddle the end of a hallway and share a single common wall), was the result of an experiment on the part of our children when they were probably about four or five years old. Wouldn’t it be cool, they thought, if we could make a hole in the wall on each side and then be able to look at each other and talk through the hole? So they took it upon themselves to begin an excavation project, boring through the layer of sheetrock on each side of the common wall so as to open up the lines of communication between them. Being so young, however, they (a) did not really understand how walls are constructed, except knowing that the wall between them was largely hollow, and (b) had little experience with tools.

They started by stealing from Karen a sandwich-bag-size package of extra-large safety pins. These they popped open and then began—at night when they were supposed to be going to sleep—the tedious scratching off of old paint to get at the sheetrock beneath. (Each room had been painted twice before: once when the older part of our home was constructed as a rental in the summer of 1983, and the second time by my parents just before Karen and I bought this place from them in 1994. Olivia’s room, on the left, had been originally a very-light cream color, and Kelty’s, on the right, had been a very pale blue. Both rooms had then been painted over with white, as had the entire interior of the original building before we moved in. )

And so our children’s excavation project continued.

Cleverly, they covered their progress—like unjustly incarcerated prisoners in those old escape films, scraping at mortar with spoon handles until the bricks began to come free and exposed old shafts and pipes and passageways that led, eventually, to freedom—with some of their artwork. Not so cleverly, they sometimes fell asleep without remembering to conceal their digging implements. And that was their undoing. It is a little disconcerting to find a large safety pin inside the covers of a young child’s bed. It is more disturbing to find an open safety pin there. Finding several of the same size of safety pins in and around the beds of both children raised alarm flags. And, of course, neither child would admit to anything at this point.

But discovery led to discovery. Examining around Olivia’s bed, I found the pilfered packet of pins. I also found several safety pins outside of the packet, some of them open and some closed. Then, as I looked around her bed, I noticed a fine white powder, somewhat akin to talcum, in the carpeting and on the trim at the base of the wall. This evidence led my eyes upward to my child’s artwork, craftily held into place with a single push pin. I removed the artwork and found a hole in the wall, nearly the size of a half-dollar. I glared at Olivia, at which point she said something like, “Kelty did it, too,” and so I moved immediately to Kelty’s room, where I discovered fewer safety pins but the same white powder, the same cover-up with artwork, and a very similar size hole. The kids could see how angry I was, and they knew that the jig was up. So they came clean.

But I have to admit that, while I was listening sternly to their explanations and plans, inside I was smiling a at their ingenuity and laughing at a critical mistake they had made: The wall between their rooms is a standard, wood-framed wall, with eight-foot studs running through it vertically from ceiling to floor. These studs are spaced evenly, on 16-inch centers, across the wall. Unaware of the studs, they merely “guesstimated” where the holes from each side would meet in the middle. Problem was, Olivia dug on one side of a stud, and Kelty dug on the other. Even though their holes were, indeed, lined up reasonably closely, a single eight-foot two-by-four was going to keep them from the communication about which they had dreamed. To remedy the situation—had we not caught them in the act—one of them would certainly have decided to gouge out a second hole. After a severe reprimand from both parents, they kids never tried such a stunt again, and Karen and I laughed aloud about it later on.

This escapade brings me to 2005, a culmination of months of Karen saying that she was going to paint the walls, Except for promising to move a few items and take down some shelves, I said I was staying out of the process. Karen often had big plans. Sometimes they came about; sometimes they did not. I knew that the walls needed work, but I didn’t want to fill all the holes with plaster, didn’t want to sand the rough spots, didn’t want to re-texture the smooth spots, didn’t want to do all of the screwing and unscrewing of book shelves and curtain rods, etc. Moving all of the furniture, placing drop cloths, painting—blah—seemed like a lot of trouble, and I wondered, truthfully, whether it would ever happen. First, it was going to happen the previous fall, then at Christmas time, then during Spring Break, then that summer.

And then it did.

Karen and the kids actually began choosing wall colors. Personally, I had expected a return to basic white—patched up, of course, but a nice clean white. Not so. My family was thinking “color.” And not only that, but Karen and the kids decided that a thorough change was in order. Out went Kelty’s long, low book shelf. Out went Kelty’s large bed. Out went Olivia’s small bookcase. Out went Olivia’s bed, to be replaced by the futon from the living room when we recently got a new couch, loveseat, and easy chair. Then out went the futon. In came a twin bed, given away by a friend of Karen’s—one for each kid. In came a new bookshelf, purchased by me at a furniture store during a liquidation sale—one for each kid. And in came the new paint.

At first, I’ll admit, I was alarmed by the color choices being floated around. Olivia eventually settled on lime-green and light blue. Karen tried to pacify me by insisting that it was a very light lime-green, much lighter than her own lime-green work-out shirt. The truth was, however, that when she was painting while wearing that very same bright lime-green shirt, she blended in almost perfectly with Olivia’s walls. The effect on me, upon initially entering the room in the early stages of painting, was, “Whoa!” It was as if I had stepped inside a giant kiwi fruit. Once my eyes and my sensibilities adjusted, however, I noticed that Karen was purposely not painting the bottom fourth of each wall and was leaving a distinctly wavy line of lime-green. This was where lime-green was to meet light blue, in the way a tropical sea might lap against a verdant forest, as seen from a vantage point out on the water— and, when it was done I had to admit that it wasn’t too bad.

And later, filled with furniture again, it seemed very bright and cheerful, and I liked it.

Kelty’s room, though, honestly, was the one I was most worried about. His first choice for his walls was solid black, and I imagined a cave from which no light could escape—a grotto good for sleeping, but too depressing to play in. And then he wanted either black or dark purple with white and either black or dark purple polka dots. And then he started talking about white walls with dark purple and black polka dots, and on and on. I grimaced. I gritted my teeth. I said a few things, but mostly I tried to stay out of it. And eventually dark purple won out as Kelty’s choice of base color, although Karen got him to consider splatter-painting over the purple, rather than painting polka-dots. I went into Kelty’s room shortly after Karen finished applying the first coat of purple to all four walls, and I was a bit shocked at how dim the room had suddenly become. I started to imagine ultra-violet and black-light posters, anarchy symbolism and dark bedding, stalactites and stalagmites, bats clinging to the single light fixture.

The next day, I went on a long, all-day, exhausting hike, returning home at about 9 p.m. Both kids were in their rooms, doors closed, waiting for me, hopeful for fatherly approval of their rooms’ final appearance. In the time I’d been gone—nearly 14 hours—Karen and the kids had finished painting in Kelty’s room and touching up in Olivia’s. They’d hauled in all the furniture, including the new bookcases and beds, and set up everything. Time for Dad’s big surprise! I went into Olivia’s room first. As I said earlier, I was very pleased, and Olivia was cute and excited. She had even talked me into helping her buy, online, new bedding, some shockingly colorful sheets and a pillowcase and a bedspread, etc., that would arrive in a couple of days in the mail—and even the thought of that now seemed right and good.

And then I faced Kelty’s closed door, with Kelty behind it, beginning to call, “Dad! Dad! Come into my room, Dad!” And so in I went.

It was very cool. With bright white and with the leftover light blue, Karen and the kids had splattered the walls (and the ceiling a little bit, too, accidentally), with the result that the walls sort of “popped” with color, like seeing the stars pop out of a night sky when you’re out in the desert or up high in the mountains, with all of that thin clear air revealing the myriad and brilliant pinpoints of light. My notion of the grotto dissipated in the face of the evidence before me, and Kelty smiled up from his new bed tucked back into the corner.

So, what we were left with was not what I had imagined months before—bland white walls, bland but clean, and decorated with the kids’ posters and artwork, looking pretty normal. Not at all. What we were left with were two unique statements of my kids’ personalities. And it was great.