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.
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