Yellow Paint

When I was eight-years-old, in an attempt to distract me from the abysmally boring town that my mother moved us to, my grandmother enrolled me in a ceramics class. The class consisted of a handful of cute little old ladies clucking busily while painting minimally and me sitting happily and quietly in the corner.

Often my grandmother and I would fine tune our creations in her living room (her newly built living room) on a rickety old card table while watching Angela Lansbury solve crimes that were painfully obvious to the average four-year-old. During one of these creative sessions, my creation required the use of school-bus-yellow paint. I cannot remember the piece, but I will ALWAYS remember the color. I reached across the table and plucked the color decisively and began turning the lid with the usual amount of gingerly applied force. That failing, I tried a bit harder and then harder in a fashion vaguely resembling wrestling an alligator. In one spectacular jerk, the lid freed and the paint leaped from the bottle in an arc and puddled in the brand new brown carpet.

I stood mortified in place, back-dropped by a steady stream of accusations and peppered with profanity. My little eight-year-old body froze, not knowing whether I should seek witness protection or cleaning products. I scrubbed and scrubbed on my hands and knees. To the day that the carpet was changed in that room, my grandmother claimed that there was a faint yellow cast to that particular region (nobody else could see it).

This last month, I traveled back to my grandmother's home. The living room, incidentally, has been recarpeted at least three times since the infamous yellow paint incident. I am blissfully walking through the living room with a pudding in my left hand when I hear the saccharin warning, “Don't spill on the carpet, dear.” In disbelief, I turn to my beaming grandmother and mutter, “I am 34-years old. I am sure that I can handle not spilling.” To which she retorts without pausing for an instant, “I am sure, but there was the yellow paint.” YELLOW PAINT!?! (this particular piece of punctuation is my husband's favorite. It is called an interrobang and is used to denote expressive disbelief and loud exclamation. It is used quite purposefully in this application.) It has been 26 years (TWENTY-SIX YEARS!?!) and I am haunted and expected to be repentant about YELLOW PAINT!?!

My young baby, just weeks past his first birthday, proudly took up the yellow paint standard this weekend. My grandmother has two recliners settled in her living room, one for herself and one for my grandfather. Perched like vultures above them are two overhead lamps, with their domes teetering precariously on their spindly bases. In an accident involving my grandmother's balance, or lack thereof, one of the lamps was “bent double” and on Saturday afternoon a new one was purchased. Sunday morning, my sweet one-year-old crawled behind one of the chairs, gripped the base of the lamp with his dimpled fist and proceeded to pull himself to a standing position. As his balance steadied the lamp succumbed to gravity and tumbled head-first into the window sill, shattering in a glittering explosion.

I apologized profusely and offered to replace her newborn lamp. The offer was denied vehemently, and I continued on about my day, soundly determined to make restitution. My determination waned with the woeful mention of, “I guess I cannot crochet today, (pausing for the dramatic sigh of a martyr), because my new lamp is broken.” I might mention that the second lamp is still standing strong and it was midday with no need for artificial illumination. The resolve to make restitution diminished further with the second mention (also containing the defeatist sigh). This same resolve then abated, abbreviated, attenuated, curtailed, declined, decreased, depreciated, died out, drained, dwindled, ebbed, extenuated, faded, lessened, receded, reduced, tapered, tempered, weakened, and finally vanished all together with subsequent sighs and subsequent moanings.

The question remains. At what age can you “bend double” a lamp without blame and without having to be reminded TWENTY-SIX YEARS LATER, “Remember that one time when you fell on your butt and broke that lamp?” Is my poor sure-footed thirty-year old son going to be stopped from approaching lighting fixtures with the heeding, “Yeah, but remember when you broke Grandma's brand new lamp?”

To further illustrate this point, I tell the story of my very responsible 11 year-old. My sweet husband bought us both brand new e-readers and my son, the bibliophile, benefited from familial trickle down economics. He has lovingly doted on his new toy, so when the battery needed charging after our long car ride, my husband kindly loaned my son his beloved new e-reader. My responsible son gently pressed the button to awaken the treasured technology, but to no avail. He pressed it again and waited patiently and then turned to me helplessly. In a declaration that I wish could be claimed as uncharacteristic, I mindlessly spout, “Oh great, you broke it!”

HE BROKE IT!?! If my husband had pressed the same button with the same pressure and the same insistence as my sweet son, he would have quite emphatically shouted, “Darn thing is broken!” But at age 11, HE broke it?

So when do YOU stop breaking things and does technology begin breaking itself? Perhaps it is when the ratio of your belongings is higher in favor of things you bought yourself than in things that your parents gave you? Perhaps it is at the age of your life when you know that YOU are going to have to explain to the clerk at the refund desk why a knitting needle tangled unyieldingly in the video player is a manufacturing defect (another rant). Perhaps it was during puberty, I distinctly remember the logical shift of blame from me to everyone else when I was that age.

I have decided for the sake of simplicity to adopt dear hubby's doctrines on who broke things. He is an equal-opportunity tyrant. If anybody else was holding, consuming, using, glaring at, or thinking about his property when it malfunctions, then THEY broke it. If he was engaged in any of the above listed activities, it is an obvious case of technological suicide.