Saga of the Sad Old Bathrooms

With all this COVID stay-at-home time, I've been circling around the rooms in this old ark of a house, where, for almost 20 years, even with TEN people living here, we had just one shower. We had to get up at 5:00 every day to squeeze in a mere six-minute sprinkling. That's when my spouse and I began to think remodeling.Usually, though, that was as far as we got - the thinking stage. And you have to know: these bathrooms were bad, with tiles done in weird unearthly colors, one a strange green like the nasty tongue-coating mint-flavored Milk of Magnesia with fixtures the exact queasy hue of Silly Putty.They dated back to the 1940s, which meant the strangely off-plumb sinks stood on skinny metal legs and were topped by medicine cabinets the size of cereal boxes. Their potholder-size wall tiles were ancient rectangles. Every few weeks, despairing perhaps of their out-of-fashion lives, first one and then another would pop out of its dry frame of grouting to smash itself silly on the floor tiles which, like ancient petrified Chiclets, kept lifting from their crumbling matrix to affix themselves like wee clinking ice skates to the bottoms of our showered-dampened feet. One friend, on seeing the awful truth about these rooms, delivered herself of the opinion that we were true saints, as otherworldly as Mother Theresa. “You’re so... non-materialistic!” she had exclaimed - by which she meant, “Gad, what crummy bathrooms.” And she hadn’t even used the one with the famous Toilet That Tilted, which, if sat upon too quickly, would give its shoulder a quick porcelain shrug and flick you off like a horsefly.But it isn’t that we were so ... other-worldly, so evolved. Our bathrooms were crummy because younger, pushier members of the household clamored for changes in their bedrooms, thus sucking up all their parents’ energies in the home-improvement department.First, it was one of our daughters, then 12. Suddenly, she despised her peach-colored bedroom. She wanted to spatter-paint it, she thought. I went along; masked every inch of molding and baseboard and painted the whole room white, walls and ceilings both. I tarped up the floor. Then, at the appointed signal, the two of us pried open four cans of bright primary-colored paint, dipped our fists clear to the knuckles in the vivid goo, and heaved it by the handful in every direction. It actually looked pretty good. (And boy was it fun!)Not two springs later, our then-sixth-grade son became desperate to redecorate his room. He said he couldn’t even study in it anymore; the wallpaper was that embarrassing. (Teddy bears in cowboy hats: we couldn't blame him.) He thought instead, a kind of God’s Eye View would make a nice decorating motif.First, we steamed off the old paper and pulled up the rug. I painted the walls pale blue and he hand-sponged them with fluffy white 'clouds'. Next, I made the ceiling a deep indigo, as directed, so he could paint upon it the nine planets, each in its proper relation to the sun.The whole project cost me three solid weeks of personal time and a permanent kink in the back from the night I knocked the black paint over and created an oil spill to rival that of the Exxon Valdez.But hey, the kid was happy. He spent all his time up there from then on. We would hear him from our own room, nights, zooming across the bare floor in his new desk chair with the wheels. And isn’t that a perfect metaphor for parenthood?  Your kids above, redecorating your world and sailing along among the stars; you down below, trying to limp to a crooked sink on rocky Chiclets. 

My Almost Famous House

A text arrived from my next-door neighbor saying that a “location manager” had just spoken to her about using both her house and ours as the setting for a major motion picture. Could he ring our doorbell too in a bit?“Sure,” I said, and 20 minutes later he was here.This wouldn’t be the first time a film crew had chosen our house. Fifteen years ago, a public utility made a commercial here using just the outside. Then, five years after that, some college kids used the inside too, to make a movie that affixed so many wires and cable to our newly painted trim that we had cause to muse on the futility of any and all home-improvement projects.“Oh, but this is the big time!” said the man, and that sounded true enough to me when I heard the names of two of the actors who have already signed to the project. “When we leave, you won’t know we were here at all.”“Even with that crew of 80 you mentioned?" I asked. “Even with that crew of 80," he said. All we had to do was (a) agree to be relocated for “seven weeks give or take”, (b) allow all our furniture be relocated too, and (c) give permission for the walls be repainted and the wallpaper be covered with other, temporary, paper as the film’s visionaries saw fit.But! All would be restored when the project was complete. AND, besides covering our housing costs, we would be compensated for our trouble with a fee to be mutually agreed upon.He took scads of pictures, talked more to my husband David, newly returned from the office, and left, with the understanding that he would come back in a week with six even bigger bigshots.When, that evening, I told my cousin about this potential offer, her reaction was swift. “WHY though? Why would you do this at all?” It was a good question.Over the next few days I began to see that I would say yes to the project mostly to see if we still had wings, as well as roots. Were we still capable of signing up for such radically new “dance suggestions” from the universe?Because we have been here one very long time: Little House on the Prairie was still airing fresh episodes when we got here. For almost four decades, I have watched the morning sun touch the tops of the tall oak trees across the street.David, who is equanimity itself, thought it might be an adventure, but I happen to know that he can be happy anywhere as long as he has his books and the daily crossword.I am not like that.I got worried about my houseplants, all still at ‘summer camp’ on the screened-in porch? Where would they go, some storage facility in South Boston? And could I actually live in a hotel, even for those seven weeks 'give or take'?As promised, the man came back with the bigshots, who spoke not a word but slithered like eels, all silent, around our rooms. As they left, our man thanked us and said he would call in a week with the decision.And when he did call, it was to say that they had decided to go with an another house in another town.Was there disappointment around here? Not for my houseplants. Not for the two rooms we freshly repainted just last month. I walked outside to where I could see those trees that greet me each morning and felt a slow smile cross my face. Because how lucky a thing is it to go from youth to age looking out at the same window at the tops of the same stately familiar trees, not just those oaks across the street, but this ginkgo and her graceful final shedding.[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVv1vsHXHmQ[/embed]