2024

	My imagination wa s always pretty hard to contain,
	and halfway through high school, I felt this urge to splash some of the thoughts swirling in my head onto the walls of my childhood bedroom.
	I asked my parents for permission.
	“I want to paint things on my walls,” I said.
	“Like what?” they asked.
	“Things that matter to me,” I said. “Things I think will be cool. You’ll see.”
	That explanation was enough for my father.
	That’s what was so great about him.
	He encouraged creativity just by smiling at you.
	He loved to watch the spark of enthusiasm turn into fireworks.
	And he understood me and my need to express myself in unconventional ways.
	So he thought my wall-painting adventure was a great idea.
	My mother wasn’t so high on the whole escapade, but she relented pretty quickly when she saw how excited I was.
	She also knew Dad usually won out on these things.
	She might as well surrender peacefully.
	For two days, with the help of my sister, Tammy, and my friend Jack Sheriff, I painted on the walls of my bedroom.
	My father sat in the living room, reading the newspaper, patiently waiting for the unveiling.
	My mother hovered in the hallway, completely nervous.
	She kept sneaking up on us, trying to get a peek, but we remained barricaded in the room.
	Like they say in the movies, this was “a closed set.”
	What did we paint?
	Well, I wanted to have a quadratic formula on the wall.
	In a quadratic equation, the highest power of an unknown quantity is a square.
	Always the nerd, I thought that was worth celebrating.
	Right by the door, I painted:
	Jack and I painted a large silver elevator door.
	To the left of the door, we drew “Up” and “Down” buttons, and above the elevator we painted a panel with floor numbers one throughsix.
	The number “three” was illuminated.
	We lived in a ranch house—it was just one level—so I was doing a bit of fantasizing to imagine six floors.
	But looking back, why didn’t I paint eighty or ninety floors?
	If I was such a big-shot dreamer, why did my elevator stop at three?
	I don’t know. Maybe it was a symbol of the balance in my life between aspiration and pragmatism
	Given my limited artistic skills, I thought it best if I sketched things out in basic geometric shapes.
	So I painted a simple rocket ship with fins.
	I painted Snow White’s mirror with the line: “Remember when I told you that you were the fairest? I lied!”
	On the ceiling, Jack and I wrote the words “I’m trapped in the attic!”
	We did the letters backwards, so it seemed as if we’d imprisoned someone up there and he was scratching out an S.O.S.
	Because I loved chess, Tammy painted chess pieces
	(she was the only one of us with any drawing talent).
	While she handled that, I painted a submarine lurking in a body of water behind the bunk bed. I
	I drew a periscope rising above the bedspread, in search of enemy ships.
	I always liked the story of Pandora’s box, so Tammy and I painted our version of it.
	Pandora, from Greek mythology, was given a box with all the world’s evils in it.
	She disobeyed orders not to open it.
	When the lid came off, evil spread throughout the world.
	I was always drawn to the story’s optimistic ending:
	Left at the bottom of the box was “hope.”
	So inside my Pandora’s box, I wrote the word “Hope.”
	Jack saw that and couldn’t resist writing the word “Bob” over “Hope.”
	When friends visited my room, it always took them a minute to figure out why the word “Bob” was there.
	Then came the inevitable eye-roll.
	Given that it was the late 1970s, I wrote the words “Disco sucks!” over my door.
	My mother thought that was vulgar.
	One day when I wasn’t looking, she quietly painted over the word “sucks.”
	That was the only editing she ever did.
	Friends who’d come by were always pretty impressed.
	“I can’t believe your parents let you do this,” they’d say.
	Though my mother wasn’t thrilled at the time, she never painted over the room, even decades after I’d moved out.
	In fact, over time, my bedroom became the focal point of her house tour when anyone came to visit.
	My mom began to realize: People thought this was definitely cool. And they thought she was cool for allowing me to do it.
	Anybody out there who is a parent, if your kids want to paint their bedrooms, as a favor to me, let them do it.
	It’ll be OK. Don’t worry about resale value on the house.
	I don’t know how many more times I will get to visit my childhood home.
	But it is a gift every time I go there.
	I still sleep in that bunk bed my father built, I look at those crazy walls,
	I think about my parents allowing me to paint, and I fall asleep feeling lucky and pleased.