LA asks if I made some marks in the house I grew up in for Yakov to find. I made one, not that it's easy to find. But it was a good one.
I have mentioned that my own kids enjoyed writing on the walls of their rooms, mostly in chalk, sometimes in felt-tipped pen, which I couldn't believe because my mother would have outright killed me if I ever did anything like that. I found it relatively creative and amusing in my kids, and their walls needed painting anyway. (Still do.) Even so. At the end of my sophomore year of college, I transferred out of The Big University Out of State and into The Local State College. I was coming out of dorm life and back home full time. It was an adjustment for us all.
I had my reasons; one of the big ones was that The Big University raised its out-of-state tuition by $500 a year, and I thought that $2500 annually was just to much to ask my parents to pay. They would have done so without question, but I couldn't do it. Also, I finally settled on a major -- yes, library science -- and The Big University didn't offer it, but Local State did.
The next three years of college, two undergrad and one year of graduate school, didn't cost $2500 combined. Good deal for the folks. They gave me Shirl's old car to commute in, bought her a new one, and, as a special gift, offered to re-decorate the married Sibs' old bedroom, bigger than mine, for me.
I went to town. I wanted wallpaper, not just white painted walls, which were my father's specialty. Every room in the house had white walls, except the kitchen and the bathroom, both papered. I wanted color, pattern! Wallpaper!
Which we did ourselves, etc. etc. But on one wall, before the paper went up, I took a big fat magic marker and wrote a memory. I don't remember the exact words, of course, and maybe they're not even still there. Maybe painted over, which would have taken buckets of primer, let me tell you.
I waxed poetic, about this being a room where two little girls grew up (I shared with the Sibs when grandparents visited, often for months at a time) and became adults, and where Grandpa lived until he died (after the Sibs was married). I went on. I put a date on it; it was sometime during the summer of 1973. I don't know if I signed it.
My mother saw it, knew I was doing it, and let me. Then we slapped that paper up and it was covered, waiting for someone else down the years to pull the paper off and exclaim "OH SHIT!" when they saw what was going to have to be done to the wall. Maybe they read it first. Maybe that god-awful red-white-and-blue wallpaper is still there. Maybe Yakov's parents are going to sue me for the cost of the wall repair now that they know who did it.
Maybe I'll drive by again over the weekend.
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I'm watching Will & Grace
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Sweet Sorrow - 06.12.2007
So ... - 12.19.2006
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Fifteen Years - 12.17.2006
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