Painting

During the past two weekends, thanks to clouds and rain, we've been painting our bedroom. Since buying this condominium several years ago we have done very little in the way of improvements. It was in good shape when we bought it, and we liked the colors everywhere except the bedroom, which was wallpapered in a dark green, almost black, tartan plaid. I kid you not. We immediately painted that room a pale green, but - I should have known better - greens are tricky, and in the particular light of that particular room, with yellowish trim and ceiling, this green didn't make it. We lived with it because we couldn't bear the idea of moving the furniture to paint the trim and ceiling, which we should have done in the first place. Well, we've done it.

The color scheme is neutral: three shades of off-white tending progressively toward brown, the lightest white on the satin-finish trim. The walls are not even dark enough to be called cafe-au-lait. It's nice. Peaceful. Much better.

But what I've been thinking about, during all those meditative hours of masking the panes in the French doors and edging the baseboards, are all the other hours - days - of painting surfaces in our home in Vermont. We must have painted every wall and moulding in that house at least twice during the thirty years we lived there, and J. sanded and painted the entire outside of the house as well, stripping off the old alligatored lead paint right down to the original clapboards. We built a two-storey garage/studio during our time there, and painted all of that too - not to mention the sheetrock, the taping, the joint compound, or the joys of raising wallboard up onto a ceiling.

When I remember those Saturdays and Sundays, I think of what we were listening to. Yankees and Red Sox baseball games, including the memorable World Series that was the last for Reggie Jackson. Saturday Afternoon at the Opera, with Vermont's own Peter Fox Smith as announcer - we were doing pro bono design work for VPR at the time: a logo, their program guides, and often helped with the on-air marathons so we got to know all the announcers and technical staff pretty well. "All Things Considered," back in the days of Susan Stamberg. Lots of jazz: Don Cherry, John Coltrane, Charlie Haden, Chick Corea, Pat Metheny, Oscar Peterson, Miles Davis. Old favorites from the Beatles to Cream, and the typical 80s pop stuff: Tina Turner, Michael Jackson, Dire Straits, Madonna -- we even named our first cat after her.

This time we had a little Sandy Denny retrospective, and one of Elton John, and heard some old jazz, but when I was working alone I listened not to the radio or CDs, but to internet podcasts or live streams, mostly on Radio Open Source: Christopher Lydon's interviews with Teju Cole, Lydia Davis, Mustafa Barghouti, Edna O'Brien, and Martin Marty (the latter talking about his recent book on Dietrich Bonhoeffer.) As I worked and listened my mind kept casting back to those earlier days, when I was certainly a reader but hadn't yet become a writer, and certainly not a publisher. Was I the same? How had I changed? And our world! Those early days with paintbrush in hand and a small computer tucked away in an upstairs room: an Osborne running CP/M, with its tiny flickering screen useful for rudimentary word processing and the spreadsheet and database programs we were just beginning to learn; a time before anyone had conceived of blogging, when I often felt intellectually lonely and just wanted a few people to talk to who were also obsessed with books and ideas...

Comments

[Eva]

Thanks for the heads up on radio open source I'll listen in.

Podcasts I find worthwhile
BBC documentaries
Zencast.org
CBC: Spark, Writers & Co, The Next Chapter, Dispatches
some TED talks
This American Life

[Lorianne]

I remember painting the cabinets in the house my ex and I used to own. He was working full-time, so I did most of the sanding & painting during the day when he was gone. For some reason, I kept playing the same two CDs over and over: Moby's Play and Lauryn Hill's The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. It was like there was something "in" the music I needed at the time, and I consumed them hungrily, like someone starved, over and over.

After the painting was done, I seldom listened to either: their work was done. When we moved from that house, I sold them along with a bunch of other CDs. But whenever I hear a song from either one, it instantly brings me back, as if the music carries within it the smell of primer and paint.

[Vivian]

Painting is summer work, all right, when the windows can be open & the light is long. I lived most of my childhood in a big square clapboard house of which my dad painted one side every summer; on the 5th year he would do the garage. Then begin again. He could paint with both hands which meant he didn't need to move the tall extension ladder quite as often as mere mortals. He would descend at dusk & pour himself a beer for "that terrible painter's thirst," then under cover of darkness, in small-town Bible-belt Pennsylvania where my mom was the local math teacher, carry the empties out to the garage.

[mary]

What a great reminiscence. Reminded me of when we first moved to this house 26 years ago. Every room was beige or stark white. My son had just started first grade and I spent the days painting yellows and blues. I listened to Pachobel's Canon over and over and over. And after school, listening to the play of my son and his friends frolicking through the house. Days of pure joy.

[Hattie]

These days I listen only to classical music or podcasts from BBC or NY Review of Books and such when I am working in the kitchen or garden. We hire other people to paint, as I HATE painting!

[Natalie]

Lovely, Beth. How about some photos of the newly-painted room? I've painted endless walls in many places and I love doing that, the way it changes the atmosphere. I've been meaning to to do it again here as my flat badly needs re-decor Congratulations for getting there.

[marly youmans]

Just wondering, thinking about the way you ended that post--is there an International Arts Movement group (IAM "I am") in Montreal?