It was the summer of 1973 when my brother and I lived on my grandfather’s farm in Chardon, Ohio. One day we decided to paint the kitchen a beautiful shade of blue.
We turned on the radio, opened the windows and began our task. I did the trim while my brother rolled, both of us working the corners, the edges, the front surfaces.
There’s something about painting—perhaps it’s the fumes, or the long quiet times of many little tasks. Painting requires no moral decisions, no great choices, no necessary pontifications about the meaning and purpose of life.
And yet there you are, with your self and the task before you. It’s actually a perfect time to re-enter the inner “I,” to think, to remember. In many ways, it is the ideal task for self-enlightenment.
After my brother and I were done painting, we felt we’d accomplished something, that we’d given something back to the old farmhouse.
When the weekend came, our Uncle Joe came to visit. He strode into the kitchen, looked at the paint, and simply said, “You didn’t use glossy!”
Glossy? We were teenagers from California visiting the home where our mother had lived. Though it may be second nature to us today, back then we had no sense that a kitchen should be painted glossy. Glossy vs. flat was not an issue we thought much about. We had no idea it mattered.
But Uncle Joe thought it was a huge deal, and just one more bit of evidence that teenagers from the big city were a bunch of dimwits who wouldn’t know a cow from a goat. Uncle Joe shared it around to family and friends that we’d painted the kitchen in “wrong” paint, so we heard plenty about in the weeks that followed. Some relatives didn’t care, but others would comment as they came in, “Oh, so there’s the flat paint job,” instead of, “Hey, hello, long time no see!”
Dumb city boys who don’t know the difference between flat and glossy paint, who actually had the stupidity to paint a kitchen in flat paint. Of course, our intent had been to make the family happy that we’d improved the old farmhouse.
Today, while I was painting my own bathroom—glossy—memories of that summer of 1973 began to play again in my mind. Perhaps it was the paint. Perhaps it was the cool breeze blowing fresh oxygen through the room. I heard the chickens out back and it reminded me of my brief period of farm living.
I began to think about how Uncle Joe had responded, and how he could have responded. I realized then the great truth in the phrase that what we do is of little or no importance, but how we do it is everything.
Back in ’73, Joe could have congratulated us on taking the initiative to paint, and could have explained why kitchens are always painted glossy. He could have told us that it was a great primer coat and enthusiastically offered to drive us to the hardware store to get glossy paint, and we’d all have done the final coat together. That would have been something. My memory would have been profoundly different, had Uncle Joe taken that route. I realized how important such “little things” can be, and wondered how well I’ll do when my next opportunity arises.
I don’t fault Uncle Joe; he probably knew no other way. In fact, from what I knew about his father (my grandfather), he’d probably have been beaten if he’d painted the kitchen with flat paint. So to Joe, that was just one of millions of automatic reactions to things in his world. He probably forgot about in a few months, after the novelty of talking about his wife Marie’s silly nephews wore off.
Uncle Joe died more than 10 years ago, and when I visited the site again, the entire farmhouse and barn had been torn down leaving nothing but a big open field. None of it mattered anymore, at least not in physical reality. Joe was gone and the big old farmhouse was simply a memory that could have been glossy, but instead was flat.
Christopher Nyerges is the author of Enter the Forest, Guide to Wild Foods, and co-author of Extreme Simplicity. Founder of the School of Self-Reliance, he has led wilderness trips since 1974.
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