Do you remember when you were a kid and your parents were painting the garage or the house or most anything, and the absolute best way that you could “help” was to disappear until they were done? Delusionally, you would ask if you could help, or even more delusionally, your parents would suggest that you help.

Pick your poison, both delusions are going to be very short lived, and both will end with you pedaling your banana bike (with the ape hanger handlebars) down the driveway. Pedaling away from the paint tray you stepped in, the paint roller you dropped in the dirt, the general tedium of being an adult. Pedaling to where? During a painting project…anywhere. Unbridled freedom until the final coat dries.

Of course, you will come home a time or two (kids are needy) and find yourself mildly dismayed that your mother doesn’t drop everything, shimmy down the ladder, and fix you a bologna sandwich just the way you like it. Thin slathering of mayo…cut diagonal. What kind of degenerate wants their sandwich cut any other way?

Mildly dismayed until you realize that while they are painting, they don’t care what you eat. You come to this glorious conclusion when the terse response to your whiney, “Mooommm I’mmm huuungry” is, “Eat something. I’m busy.” With the same twinkle in your eye that you had when you pedaled away from painting, you saunter into the kitchen and eat a lot of somethings.

Everything except those fancy little square cubes wrapped in gold foil you snuck out of the cupboard last week. “Bouillon” sounds exotic, but they were almost as bad as those Circus Peanuts grandma tried to pawn off as candy…almost.

So, there you are, King of the Kitchen, a Keebler Fudge Stripe dangling off each finger. You smugly show your little brother the middle cookie when he asks if he can have one. He of course threatens to tell mom (that’s what little brothers do), but you know for a fact that she’s precariously perched on the ladder step that says, “NOT A STEP” and in no mood to hear little brothers whine about cookies and fingers, so you waggle the middle cookie with impunity.

My wife had me pick up a bucket of paint the other day so she could paint the shed and the garage. Like a good husband, I delivered the bucket of paint as requested, and the following morning I looked out to see her in her painting clothes meticulously applying a coat of “Crisp Linen” to the shed. It was a lovely fall day for a bike ride, but first I had to stop by the hardware store to pick up some hardware store type stuff.

I sauntered out to the shed to ask my wife if she needed anything from the hardware store, and she said, “If you are going to help me paint, pick up another paint roller.”

I remember when I was a kid, and the absolute best way I could help paint was to disappear until the painting was done. Sometimes I miss being a kid. It was a lovely fall day for painting. So it goes.