Ceiling

Just so long as it isn’t a popcorn one of the nineteen fifties, in all its sparkling, toxic splendor! I’d prefer those of the churches of Denmark, high and wooden and ark-like with rows of hanging ships to carry me off to Valhalla on a watery trip to death and rebirth.

There are ten of us, me the eldest, seven brothers and two sisters. My sisters were born near the end and so I do not know them in the same way that I do the pack of brothers with whom I shared my childhood years, but there is this uncanny connection to my sisters and the kind of troubles we’ve had with men.

Sarah calls me crying and wondering if she is cursed after her most recent break-up. I tell her the story of how as a child I dreamt of winning the Coke It’s the Real Thing, contest, one thousand dollars for spelling it out in caps, reveals under the peeled wax seals. Not that there weren’t many American kids wishing to win, but I’d bet I was the only one who wanted to use the winnings to fix the ceiling in our long living room, once two rooms expanded in order to house us all.

The entire room had been papered in green leaf and the real plants and couches complimented the new Earth Stove with its orange ceramic decoration which finished the room, but there was that forever, unfinished, not matching line that ran between the two rooms, needing dry wall and to be orange-peeled to fuse the two together.

My eyes just wouldn’t stop going to that ugly line, watching visitors carefully to see if they too saw the flaw.

I thought this finishing would somehow bring my parents together in a joy that always seemed to elude no matter the constant remodels to our sixty-three-thousand dollar home, the 1922 compromise instead of the new-built-on-the-hill dream, that property had been sold.

My sister and I ponder what it could mean that a child would wish nothing more than to pay a professional dry-wall-man to repair the lid rather than dream the freedom of new Levi’s and Vans shoes, or Rossignol skis?

Please help me!

Photo Credit: Greg Daines/unsplash