Number 10

But I digress.  I’m supposed to be describing the joys and frustrations of buying and selling the twelve houses we’ve lived in.  As you may recall, we were back in Sacramento, me and the Mrs. (And please don’t send comments criticizing my grammar. I know it ain’t right to say me and the Mrs., but Hawkeye Pierce said it on an episode of MASH, and I liked its alliterative sound.).  Anyhow, we, me and the Mrs., hadn’t moved for a few years and were starting to get restless.  So we started driving around the suburbs looking at model homes in new subdivisions. Usually a developer built and furnished four or five show homes with different floor plans, offering a variety of carpeting, tile, colors, etc. that one could walk through to get a better idea of what it might be like if one actually owned it. Each of the models would have an exotic name such as “The Titanic” or “The Shangrila” or “The Hairy Truman.” And then one could say to one’s spouse, “But dear, I liked the fireplace in the garage in the Shangrila, didn’t you?” And so in Folsom, small town of prison fame, we discovered a lovely “3-br, shk-rf, frpl, 3-car gar.” The price was in range, and we were impulsive, young and foolish.  Our first brand new house. We got to pick the colors and the carpet and everything!  The little house by the Big House.

It came with a 10-year builder’s warranty.  The first call went out the day after we moved in when rain water started dripping onto the electric stove.  The construction foreman came out to explain that the leak was from a vent pipe on the roof.  “But I can’t send nobody up there in this rain. Them shake shingles is slipperier than snot on a door knob.”  Clear enough.

And so we settled in.  New neighbors, new restaurants, new mortgage payments.  But after just a couple of years, the exterior stain started to peel off the siding.  Sadly, the 10-year warranty did not cover paint for 10 years.  It seems that paint was warranted only for the day we actually moved in.  So I started painting, a fairly easy process on a one-story house on level ground.  Except at one place where there was a second gable set back about 10 feet from the edge of the roof.  Having completed the other three sides, this was to be the final day.  It was a fine, beautiful California day––sunny and warm.  The Mrs. had gone off to buy shoes, and I was home alone.  I rested the top of the ladder against the gutter, positioned its base against the retaining wall and started up with my bucket and brush.  I stepped onto the roof and sat down in front of the short, triangular gable rising about four feet from the edge and began to apply paint. The paint can is resting on the sloped roof.  I am thinking about what a neat job I have done overall on this project when I feel an unwelcome dampness in the area of the buttocks––a signal that all is not well.  The paint can, which had been half full, and which had been more or less situated behind me, is now empty, its light- gray, guaranteed- one-coat contents enveloping my pants, shorts, socks and shoes. The remainder is running down the brown cedar shakes into the rain gutter.  Checkmate.

No one at home, no one visible about the neighborhood.  Having no other choice, I took off my saturated pants, shoes and socks and slip-sloped and butt-slimed over to the ladder, trying very hard to hold back the viscous tide from dripping down onto the newly installed brick patio. Two hours later, I have more or less sopped up the paint with about ten roles of the Quicker-Picker-Upper and am contemplating filing for idiocy when the little woman comes back home to ask, pleasantly, how it went.

Some days later, while I am painting the now light- gray roofing shingles a rich brown, our kitty-corner-across-the street neighbor, Pete, came over to tell me how he and his wife had watched the whole incident from their second floor bedroom that day and thought that I had nice legs.

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