Don’t Touch that Dial!

Subtitled: Or on second thought, please do.

The following is to be sung to the tune of–oh, you’ll know once you start humming it!

“Paint the walls with aging rockers,
Fa la la la la la la la…blah.”

This post is the third and last (I promise!) in my Painting the Walls of Daughters’ Room Series.

As I have already noted, the key to getting this very large room finally finished was shipping the children most emphatically out for the evening. This was made possible by my dear friend Tina, who, sweetheart of a gal that she is, offered to keep my 5 young charges overnight.

Perhaps she felt that her own 5 children wouldn’t keep her busy enough as it was. Perhaps she just enjoys our children’s company. Or, most probably, perhaps she just needed an extra good bit of Advent penance to jumpstart her devotions.

In any case, I dropped them off on Friday afternoon at 5:00 with the promise I’d be back to get them sometime that weekend. All the way home I thought about how nice it would be to go for dinner and a movie with my husband finally get that room painted.

The bedrooms in our house are a bear to paint, by the way. The ceilings are tall and vaulted. I am not.

But given that my daughters had been sleeping amidst the rollers, paint and crunchy dropcloths for the past two weeks (and thinking it all very fun, I might add), I was resigned to a caffeine-fueled late night painting party.

My husband, the big dear, looked on.

To his credit, he covered for me throughout my many blog-reading breaks throughout the evening. This particular project, however, was my own and he was more than willing to let me tackle it.

And so, armed with a good strong cup of Millstone’s hazelnut creme and dressed in my baggy, paint-splattered finest, I made my way upstairs. Thinking it might be nice to have some musical accompaniment (and not wanting to drag my husband’s 36-piece stereo system into the room with me), I grabbed the small clock radio from my bedroom.

Thus began the adventure.

Feeling festive, I tuned into one of the local “classic” rock stations. You never quite know where these stations will take you mentally, I find.

In other words, what embarassing era of my past will be revisited?

At first I felt amused and quite nostalgic. The pace of my painting picked up. I hummed; I sang along.

It wasn’t but a couple songs into the playlist, however, that I found my thoughts, like the paint I was employing, were just all over the place.

This surprises you not a whit to hear, I know.

Who was Jessie’s girl, for example, and was she embarassed to be sung about like that? Is Madonna a good mom? What exactly does Roger Daltry mean by all this screeching to be free?

To think I used to listen to this stuff so indiscriminately!

I changed the dial.

The next stop was country-western, if not just to see my husband come and cock an eyebrow at my choice. (I may be from North Dakota, but my cowboy boots are LONG retired.)

Again, at first I was amused by the snappy beat and twangy singing.

But then, as was almost expected at this point, the lyrics became mentally invasive. Have you heard the one about the guy who is wooing his beloved by saying, “To the hairdresser at the mall, you’re just another head of hair. To the waiter, you’re just another tip. But…” and I think this is where the singer hoped to redeem himself, “you’re everything to me!”

Ho-kay, I thought. It’s time to move on.

Finally I went with my safest, surest bet and that was classical. The beautiful music freed my mind and allowed my thoughts to wander to other less mentally cumbersome places. I thought about my husband, puttering about the basement with all his fish stuff and in general just being cute. I thought about my children and hoped that Camille was being good for my friend and her husband. (We phoned them. She wasn’t.) And finally, I thought about this blog and what I might write for it.

You definitely need your thoughts freed up for that one!

Mostly, though, I just enjoyed the peaceful, lilting rhythms that filled the room. My soul was at peace and my thoughts, for the most part, were harnessed.

Please know that I am not anti-rock or anti-country by any stretch. I think that those genres have their place–at a wedding dance or on the treadmill, for example, or when you’re driving all night and the sunflower seeds & soda just aren’t cutting it.

And like certain on-line friends of mine, I really enjoy singing along to Christian rock.

But you know, when it comes right down to it, I find that much of this modern music is just discordant. I don’t like who I am “in” it, if you know what I mean. It is as if the lyrics wash over me and into me like some off-color coat of paint.

And in the end it’s not that easy to wash off.