Where I learn a lesson about drawing…
“Now remember, “Mother said, “your father and I are bringing some guests by after the opera, so please keep the house neat.”
Bringing people over to our house after the opera was nothing new to me. My parents often did that. I never knew who those people would be each time, so I never paid attention to who they were.
Keeping the house neat was another matter. My mother wouldn’t have had to remind me had I not, previously, left the house in less than pristine condition when they returned.
I had about four hours from when my parents left for the opera before they returned. I thought about hitting the books right away, but four hours was a long time; I could always wait until closer to the time they came home to study; They would find me studying on their arrival, and I’d get praise and bonus points. I know I should have been doing my homework; I had a big social studies test the next day.
I liked that idea. So what to do with the rest of my time now that my parents had gone? It took me about 5 minutes, with no ideas, to become bored. So what did I do? I called my friend Ronald up and asked him to come over. He always had good ideas.
Ronald came over and brought a lot of different colored markers, some masking tape, and some large sheets of drawing paper.
Ronald said, “We’re going to paint a mural.”
That sounded cool to me. He had all of the materials we needed, and if we were careful, what could possibly go wrong?
My room was a little cramped, so we decided that we would do our painting in the living room. We needed a solid backing under the drawing paper, so we decided not to use the rug as our easel. Ronald suggested I use the masking tape to attach the drawing paper to the walls. Since there were pictures on the walls throughout the living room, we couldn’t place the drawing paper end to end, so we just set the papers throughout the room. When completed, we figured we could tape the whole thing together and hang the finished mural somewhere, probably in my room. Boy, would my parents be surprised!
We spent almost two hours drawing our mural. The mural was an alien space battle on the moon. We did each section, ensuring we got close to the edge of each sheet without drawing on walls. Drawing on the living room walls would be a disaster.
When we finished drawing, we untaped the pictures and took them down so we could assemble the mural. Did you know that certain drawing papers are porous, and when drawn on by permanent magic markers, the ink can bleed through onto whatever is underneath?
While we were careful not to draw directly on the walls, when we removed the paper from the walls, there were images of everything we had done permanently affixed to the walls. We had an hour to figure out what to do.
Ronald had a great plan. All we needed to do was move the pictures that my parents had already put on the walls so that they covered up the drawings we had leaked onto the walls.
We went about doing exactly that. With Ronald’s help, we carefully lifted off all the wall portraits hanging on the walls. Ronald then held onto the stepladder from dad’s workshop for me as I took the picture hooks out of the walls and repositioned them to the spots over our leaked wall drawings. Then we rehung the pictures. Lucky for us, there were the same number of wall portraits as there were marker bleeds.
With about 10 minutes to spare, Ronald mentioned that he had to go home, and he left without taking any of his supplies with him.
I quickly gathered up all the markers, the tape, the drawings and threw them under my bed in my bedroom. I put the stepladder back in dad’s workshop. I grabbed my social studies books, went back to the living room, and was sitting on the couch when my parents walked in with their guests. The guests happened to be my social studies teacher and her husband,
My social studies teacher was quite pleased to see me preparing for the test. She said something about looking forward to seeing how I’d do. She might have said something else, but I really wasn’t focussing on her.
I watched my mom scan the living room, particularly the paintings on the walls and the little holes in the walls that were left behind where those pictures should have been.
Did you ever notice that moms have that look in their eyes that clearly say, “The jigs up?”
My mother looked at me with those knowing, glaring eyes and sneered, “Ronald’s been here. We’ll talk later.”
Later turned out to be her usual Ronald speech. You know, “What were you thinking?” “That boy is nothing but trouble.” “I don’t know what you see in him.” and on and on.
The end result was that my father and I moved the paintings back to their original places. With my father’s help, I spackled the new picture hanging holes and had to repaint the walls to cover up all the marks from our drawings. I had to give up my allowance until I paid for the wall paint I used. As to the mural, I had to give it to Ronald. It was not seen in our house again. Ronald said he hung it up in his room. It was gone when I got to see him again at his house. I’m not sure what happened to it.
