Reading: What's that?

Moving: Priming. Taping. Painting.

House: Priming. Taping. Painting.

22 May 2000: Priming

I have to keep reminding myself that this is my house and if I fuck it up I have to live with it.

I've been thinking it was middle school but as I try to piece it together I'm pretty sure my mother and I didn't paint my room until I was in 11th grade. I'm trying to remember the gaps in her full-time employment that would have made for a convenient painting time. When I first moved upstairs, in fourth grade, I had pictures cut out from freebie Purina calendars my grandmother gave me all taped over the gables. Dogs and cats. When I got sick of them and took them down, I had a spotty ceiling: green walls, white ceiling, and paintless spots on the slopes under the Cape's peaked roof. As I remember, and of course none of my memories of youth are tinged with resentment, I lived with those spots for a long time.

Then we painted. What I remember from that is trying to agree with my mother on what music to play. That I voiced a preference at all indicates I was in ninth grade or older. I wanted to listen to some classical tapes I'd borrowed from Phoebe and she wanted to listen to Muzak or easy listening. It had to be spring of 1983 or later, because I was given a tape player for Christmas of ninth grade.

She told me I could choose my own room's colors. I wanted yellow walls and white trim. She said no.

I loved Jean Little's Look Through My Window and when Emily moved into the big house (which reminded me of the Bee and Thistle Inn, of course), she painted her poet's garret yellow with white trim. That's what I wanted. Furthermore, my mother's bedroom was green with white trim and so I had seen an actual room done that way.

Eventually she remembered that she had said I could have what colors I wanted and told me that when I ended up hating it, as she hated her own bedroom, then I'd have to live with it. I think she relented not because she recognized that she'd promised but because she wanted to be right and me to be unhappy.

She was wrong. I loved it, and I continued to love it, and CLH, who'd agreed with our mother at first, also loved it.

Anyway, that's the last time I painted anything.

Until Saturday.

It turns out that it wasn't the freak who put semi-gloss paint on the walls but someone before her. Whoever did it ensured we would spend the day with primer. Friday RDC washed the walls with TSP (he said the water was black) and spackled, puttied, and sanded. He didn't get the primer on as he'd hoped. Saturday we primed. I taped and primed the windows and he primed the ceiling and walls.

This is just the bedroom, remember.

The deal with priming (and painting) the windows is that our bedroom windows have two sashes (are they called sashes?). The bottom ones go up, but the top ones don't come down. The top sashes comprise six panes of glass in a rectangle, three across and two high, and the perimeter of each of those panes has to be taped.

In my mother's house, a similar look is achieved by hooking a double-t of wood across a large pane of glass, diving one pane into the look of six. I always thought that was damn stupid, particularly after reading Little House on the Prairie and The Fountainhead. I learned from the first (in second grade) that glass is expensive and larger pieces are geometrically more expensive, and I learned from the second (in eleventh grade) that although my parents had paid for the glass they could afford, they paid more (for the double t) to achieve a look of being able to afford less.

I'm over Ayn Rand. I'm not over Laura Ingalls Wilder, but that doesn't mean I want to emulate her.

Except I am. Six panes of glass per upper sash; six upper sashes in the bedroom.

We rose at 7:00 (after waking, perversely, at 5:00) and were at the house at 8. We ate breakfast (juice and muffins) on our porch swing, toted into the house everything we'd crammed into the car, and got to work. I went back to the house in the not-quite-so-early morning for the vacuum cleaner and more stuff, but otherwise we primed and taped all day.

We discovered that we have a magpie for a neighbor. The second time we saw the house, April 3, when RDC was pretty sure he wanted it but I was leery about the freak, as we and the realtor prowled the backyard, I looked up at a magpie's call. I had worried that, living closer to downtown, we'd have fewer magpies. But we live close enough to City Park that we have lots of birds, and in fact one magpie lives very close by. It perched in our cherry tree and gave us a beady eye.

Except for some bland tabouli left over from the day before, we ate nothing from breakfast to evening. RDC hinted I should go on a food run, but I was wearing my ratty old floral housecleaning dress and not about to change or go out into public. We, champions of fitness that we be, both were reeling with weariness by 8:00, whereupon we threw in the towel.

We gathered up Blake (who'd been a mostly good boy all day) and set off, to discover there was a 45' wait at Tommy's Thai. Moments after we got home with our Chipotle burritos stuffed with lime-cilantro rice, the phone rang. I was getting Blake an inexcusably late supper as RDC fumbled for the phone. "There is no one in the world I want to talk to," I would have said if I could have still spoken, "except my sister or Nisou." By the time I finished compiling my mental list, RDC had answered.

RDC exclaimed, "Hi SEM!" Okay, except SEM, I added silently. He is much happier these days, seems to be falling in love with a perfect woman. Perfect except for one flaw: she's predominantly gay. But only mostly, and a lot of her friends that he's met are also gay and don't resent her switch-hitting. Their both liking women gives them more in common, he enthused. I was so happy to hear him cheerful. For one thing, I like my boy to be cheerful, and for another thing, it meant that he could do all the talking (while I did all the eating).

Sunday we started it all over again. I finished the last window, the floor moldings, and inside the closets. "Are you sure you want to paint the closets?" "If a thing is worth doing, it's worth doing right." (I'm my father!) "Okay." That was Saturday.

Sunday, priming, I looked up at the ceiling of the closet. I think our ceilings are nine feet tall. They're certainly more than eight, but maybe just 8.5. I pictured myself up a ladder painting the ceiling of the closet just because I'm my father's daughter.

"I just made a command decision. We are not painting above eye level in the closets."

Meanwhile RDC was painting the ceiling, flat white, and I was applying a first coat of semi-gloss white to the windows. There was a noise. "I think that's the doorbell." "Really? What a wretched noise." A wretched pathetic noise, since it was barely audible. I'd taken the precaution, a half-hour before, of showering and putting on overalls instead of my ratty dress.

For indeed, there in the doorway were Jenn and Kevin. RDC said later they're bigger Mac fanatics than we are. I only know I prefer them, but I don't know their inner workings enough, and RDC's loyalties have been tending Linux-ward lately. RDC has a Sherlock t-shirt and another with Apple in several different languages all over it. I have no Mac t-shirts. Jenn wore a lime i-apple and Kevin proclaimed the coming of system ten with a blueberry X. I guess I don't walk the walk.

I gave them the tour and we ended up on the porch. I said later it hadn't taken us very long to get meta, but actually it must have been 20 minutes or so. And we didn't talk journals at all the first time we met.

There we swung or perched on our so-comfortable porch walls. RDC went back to painting. We watched the next-door dog, Charley, play with one of those dog toys, the box from which a piece of kibble can eventually be shaken. We watched every car go by, scrutinizing the drivers. Blake watched pigeons.

Jenn and I plotted talking trash about being blown off. I was going to suggest making one of those large cardboard cut-outs so we could pretend. Neither of these schemes was necessary, because eventually Beth and Jeremy did pull up.

I had wondered. I'd seen photographs of Columbine and spoken with him on the phone the day before, but, meeting him, I wasn't prepared for his height or how very penetrating his vivid blue eyes are. I always wonder about a person's voice, their gait, their presence.

Beth was talking before she even got to the porch, which made the occasion seem continuous to journal entries and email. "We are so tired." I was none too swift myself and left her grappling for names. There are plenty of pictures of me on my site, and simple deduction led her to Jenn, and after saying hi to each of us, Beth said, "And you're Rich?" to Kevin. That's me, not fulfilling my hostessly duties.

I gave Beth and Jeremy another house tour and this time all six of us--seven, with Blake of course--wound up on our patio where I forgot to bring out cookies until much too late. I found out that, just as Beth says, Jeremy can fix anything. He flipped a lightswitch in my study and the overhead illuminated for the first time. RDC had just discovered that one of our fenceposts is rotten; unfortunately Jeremy didn't stick around long enough to fix that. Beth is handy too: she identified a mystery shrub as a peony, recognized my lampposts as the Narnia-portals they might be, and saw the potting counter in the basement as a potting counter, instead of as the brewing counter that RDC mistakenly has called it. (Well, maybe we could share.)