How To Paint Water

 How To Paint Water

You can’t do it.  The paint will not stick to the water no matter how much you may try.  You can try to use paint on some other surface, like canvas, to look like water. Of course, that is what I mean.  I remember my confusion with many things the teachers, the adults, would say when I was a child.  Such as, “Everyone, draw a tree.”  Nonsense.  

“You can’t draw a tree,” I would think.  “I can try to draw a picture of a tree.”

And quite naturally I would draw a lollipop, a green lollipop, like every other kid in the class.  Which seemed like proof to me that nobody could draw a tree.  I wasn’t a grammar fanatic, or anything. In fact, even now I use a kind of shotgun approach to grammar.

If I can read it out loud and it sounds right, then it is grammatically correct.  I mean, gotta be, right?  When you read out loud to other people, all the stupid pops up immediately.  Thinking, “Huh?  That can’t be right.”  

My mother said, a lot, “Don’t cut off your nose to spite your face.”  What!!!  “Cut off my nose!!! “, that’s what a child hears.  And, “What does my face have against my nose.  My nose is on my face. (Isn’t it?). Years later I learned how to use a dictionary and looked up “spite”.  Oh, I get it now.  It’s like, “Shooting yourself in the foot.”  

Which to my mind at the time meant, “Ah crap, then I would need new shoes.”  Shoe buying in my day was a totally unfun experience for a child.  They always had to to be fitted by a shoe salesman.  A man.  Wearing a stiff shirt and what I thought were the ugliest shoes in the store.  He always seemed to have dandruff too.  

Everything about these guys just shouted, “I actually know nothing about shoes and children are alien beings to me.”  They would clamp your foot onto this really cold metal device and move a thingy up to the outcropping just behind your big toe.  He would read off a number. And my mother would add a half for room to grow.  Which meant I would be flopping down the school hall like a short clown for six months.  Trying not to trip on the extra room to grow.  

And you got the dandruffy saleman’s services thrown in free.

I was fifteen before I put a stop to that.  I told her, “I’m gonna get my new shoes myself!” We almost got a “mother/son divorce” over that.  I was gonna run away from home before I went to the Jr. Prom in floppy shoes.  

It was also a time when there was a communist behind every tree (whether you had drawn it or otherwise).  Which meant being able to run fast in floppy shoes wasn’t gonna work.  “Moms”, what are ya gonna do?

Guns  were also serious business then and shooting was mostly in movies and involved with, like, wars. In my family wasting a bullet on your own foot seemed stupid because you can’t eat your foot.  Ah, the days of yore … 

Today I don’t leave the house without my cell phone.

“The what?”