by Jim Whitehouse
“So what happened then?” I ask Hilly, who’s been telling a story about painting a huge old house one summer when he was in college.
He got to the part about lugging a 40’ ladder up to the front of the house and trying to figure out how to set it up all alone and then just stopped talking.
“It’s too painful a memory to go on,” he says, which is his way of getting me to beg him to finish the story.
“Come on, come on,” I urge. “You can’t stop there.”
“Oh, my aching heart!” he says, clutching his chest. “It was awful. It’s hard enough to put up a 20’ ladder all alone, but 40’? Impossible. But, I did it.”
“How?” I ask.
“I drank more beer.”
“OK, so you got the ladder set up. What then?” I ask.
“I had to climb up to the very peak of the gable end of the house and scrape and paint, standing on my tiptoes on top of that ladder. It was awful.”
“Did you succeed?” I ask.
“I hadn’t had much sleep, so I was up there hanging on for dear life, painting, when I fell asleep,” he says.
“You fell asleep on top of the ladder?”
“Yes. And I would have fallen, but I had a dream that I was eating an ice cream cone and woke up with the paint brush—and paint—in my mouth,” he says.
“Lead-based paint?” I ask. “It would explain a lot.”
Later in the day I’m telling my beloved wife Marsha and her sister Peg, who is on speaker phone, about Hilly’s paint-brush-in-the-mouth experience.
“I’d never make a mistake like that,” I say.
“Ahem,” says Marsha.
“Ahem?” I reply, intelligently.
“Yes. Ahem.”
“When have I ever…”
“Just yesterday,” she says.
“Yesterday? I wasn’t even painting yesterday,” I say. “Or yesteryear, for that matter.”
“You do remember going to Shifty Cogswell’s house on our way home from the store, don’t you?” she says.
“Sure. Good old Shifty. He brought you some smoked fish from Charlevoix and we stopped to pick it up,” I say, happy to have a good memory.
“Right. But you don’t eat fish,” she says. “So Shifty gave you a jar of raspberry preserves.”
“So much better than fish!” I say.
“Fish is better for you than raspberry preserves,” Peg chimes in.
“Raspberry preserves taste a LOT better,” I say.
“Do you remember what happened when we got in the car to leave his house?” says Marsha.
“No, I don’t,” I lie. “I have no recollection of that at all.”
“OK, what happened?” asks Peg.
“Shhh!” I say to Marsha, but she’s not to be stopped.
“The gearshift in our car is a palm-sized round knob on the center console. You just twist it to select the proper gear,” says Marsha.
“Ours is the same,” says Peg.
“Well, Jim started the car in Shifty’s driveway, reached down, put it in reverse and gave it a little gas. Nothing happened,” says Marsha.
“Why not?” asks Peg.
“Jim didn’t know what was wrong, so he kept twisting that knob, trying to find the right gear, but the car still didn’t move.”
“Huh,” says Peg. “How odd.”
“Yes, he is.”
“She meant the car,” I mutter.
“No, I didn’t,” says Peg.
“The problem finally resolved itself,” says Marsha. “Eventually, after twisting that knob back and forth a dozen times, Jim finally looked down to see what was going on.”
“And what was going on?” asks Peg.
“He was twisting the jelly jar in the cup holder next to the gearshift knob.”
