I was sitting here in my office, staring at the things around me because my brain felt too tired to work, and I noticed lots of red and green marks on the wall. There is also a large purplish blue smudge. I was staring at this odd array and wondering how it had passed my notice. The wall is white and the marks are very obvious. As I stared, I noticed that the marks define a somewhat rectangular shape of cleanliness. Memory dawned. A whiteboard used to hang on that wall back in the days when it was still Howard’s office. Pre-school Kiki and Toddler Link would come and draw on the board, but they often missed. One particularly elaborate spiral shows exactly how enthusiastic they were about missing. We tried to wash off the marks, but the dry erase marker defied our clean up attempts.
Since those days we’ve re-arranged the office multiple times. The dry erase board was removed and is still kicking around the house. But somehow I stopped even seeing the marks on the wall. They were so familiar that my brain just dismissed them. My home is filled with marks such as these. There is the gouge upstairs where a full length mirror once fell. There are the divots created by the child gates which used to barricade the stairs. The ceilings in several bedrooms are speckled with yellowed glow in the dark stars, once invisible against white paint, now peeling and falling off. Sometimes these damages make me feel quite bleak, because they show so clearly the fact that we need to spend more time fixing up the house. However, on the day when I repaint the walls I hope I spend just a moment contemplating the stories behind the marks before I obscure them.
When my wife and I bought our house in Sunset, up by Hill Air Force Base, everything in it was old. The entire place looked like it hadn’t seen any ‘fixing up’ since the construction date in 1962. We concluded we’d be ripping almost everything down/out at some point, so we let our daughter go crazy on the walls of her bedroom. There is now a lively menagerie-like picture saga sprawling across every wall, the door, parts of the ceiling, and even the walls of the closet. At first I cringed, then after awhile I realized that when we finally do come to the point of remodeling her room — we’re knocking out the wall between it and the next bedroom, and making her one, large room that ought to do her until she moves out and/or goes to college — I will not want to do it. Those ‘messy’ walls are her story, as it were. Fantastical and nonsensical creatures, people, things… almost like pictograms. I wish I had a ‘Rosetta Stone’ to go with them. One thing is for sure, I am going to photographically capture ALL off it before the sledgehammer begins to swing. Those drawings are priceless.