Getting it right the third or fourth time (05/23/07)

Years ago, when our daughters were little children, I often used to recite a silly nonsense poem by the late Theodore Roethke.

Roethke's dead now, and our daughters are grown.

But the poem has been ringing in my ears the last couple of weeks.

It went something like this:

"Suppose the ceiling went outside

and just caught cold and up and died.

The only thing we'd have for proof

that it was gone would be the roof.

I think it would be most revealing

to find out how the ceiling's feeling."

It's a great little bit of seemingly effortless wordsmith work that plays well with kids.

But that doesn't explain why those words have been running through my head all this month.

To understand that, you have to understand the chore at hand.

And the chore at hand has been the - virtually endless - project of moving our bedroom up into the space that was formerly occupied by the twins' bedroom.

In other words, there was a ceiling to be painted.

And it didn't turn out to be a simple project.

It started with purple paint. That is, a gallon of the fancy new ceiling paint that goes on light purple, changes to lavender, then changes again to white.

The theory is that it's easier to keep track of where you've painted when the color isn't your basic white.

And it's not a bad theory. But when it came to the execution, things didn't go so well.

Much of that is my fault, of course. It always is. (That's the nature of do-it-yourself projects; job one is to accept the blame.)

At any rate, I set out a couple of weeks ago to paint the ceiling of our new bedroom with the purple/white paint. (It still sounds like something invented in a Portland High School pep session.)

It went on OK, but I soon ran into a difficulty. Anyone who has ever painted a ceiling knows it's best to make a clean sweep across the room.

I couldn't do that. There was a mass of miscellaneous junk in the room, so instead of sweeping across from one side to the other I made a kind of hook pattern.

Bad decision.

When it dried, it looked as if a hook-shaped scar were running up the middle of the ceiling.

I tried again. A night later, using up the last of the "goes on purple" paint," I tried to blend things together.

It didn't work

Time for Plan C. That meant buying some orthodox, garden variety ceiling paint and seeing if I could cover up the imperfect section.

Now keep in mind that perfection was never the goal. Instead, I was simply looking for a ceiling that was normal, the kind you never think about.

But Plan C's flaw was that the orthodox ceiling paint dried a slightly different shade of white from the purple stuff.

When finished, I no longer had a peninsula-shaped area that looked funny; I had an island-shaped area that looked funny.

In the end, with Roethke's rhymes running through my head, there really was no other choice but to start all over, using one kind of paint and sweeping my way across the room the way I should have in the first place.

If you're keeping score, that's four attempts before I finally got it right.

As to how "the ceiling's feeling," I don't have a clue. But as for me, I'm pooped.[[In-content Ad]]