Feast of St. Patrick confessions

Happy birthday, Emily.

I went to the scout office to turn in my paperwork and pick up some patches for my bag. Pat found a 2007 Camp Tapico patch for me and even let me buy a climbing merit badge patch, on condition that I don't give it to a scout.

I thought briefly about going to my grandpa's house while I was pulling out of the parking lot. I didn't really feel like going, but I wanted to see them at some point over break so I guilted myself into going. Then I realized I wouldn't have to take the freeway if I stopped at his house, so cheerily I went, making only one especially stupid navigational error ("that looks like some sort of factory on the left, so I ought to be turning right").

I pulled into his driveway and gave him a hug as I walked in the door. His clothes matched: gray pants (belt undone) and a gray-and-white plaid shirt. Both were stained with the blue paint he'd recently used on the basement walls. "Do you have any work for me?" I asked.

For as long as I can remember, these four black-and-gold profiles in tilted-square frames hung on the east wall in his living room. He had taken them down, and he told me he wanted to fill the wall with pictures.

These were gathered on the couch awaiting wallhanging: Uncle Steve's 11x14 senior picture in a large, smooth, light-brown wood frame (taken from a shelf in the basement); my dad's 11x14 senior picture in a large, rippled dark-brown wood frame (taken from the basement wall); Uncle Chris's 8x10 senior picture in a thin wood frame (taken from a shelf in the basement); an elaborate matching pair of worn-out-fake-gold frames holding 11x14s of my dad and Uncle Chris when they were about four (taken from the upper stairwell).

I gently tried to discourage him from putting these together on the wall, but secretly I wanted to see what the wall would look like when he was done. We pulled three nails from the wall and left the top center one in to mark the middle of the wall, and it was time to work.

He'd bought a package of tiny plastic suction-cup hooks to hang them up. I pressed a dry suction cup against the white paint and let it fall, but I was disappointed to find out that my grandfather was not so easily discouraged. He explained that suction cups don't stick unless they're wet, so I lightly licked one while he soaked another like an excited puppy. We pressed them onto the wall. Neither stuck.

"I think your best bet would be to use nails," I suggested. Determined to get his money's worth from the tiny suction cup hooks, he told me he had some gorilla glue and asked if I'd heard of it. My eyes got real big.

He spread yesterday's newspaper on the kitchen table to protect the ratty old tablecloth and leaned over the suction cups, dabbing them with glue that was the nasty yellow-green color of hydrochloric acid.

I knew I had to prevent him from gorilla gluing the tiny suction cups to the wall because the tiny plastic hooks attached to the tiny suction cups didn't look strong enough to hold these heavy, decades-old pawnshop frames.

He finished dabbing glue onto one suction cup, and he stuck it on the wall. I was happily surprised to find that the glue didn't hold any better than our saliva had.

He tried again, this time with more glue. Again, the glue didn't hold.

I had an idea. I picked up one of the tiny suction cup hooks in my hand and hung my dad's senior picture from it, but it didn't break. I swung the picture back and forth a bit, but it didn't break. I twisted the hook back far beyond its normal range and it snapped with a pathetic little sound. The frame fell to the floor.

"Grandpa," I said, "I don't think these hooks are strong enough to hold the frames. Look." I showed him the broken hook.

He set down the glue and looked. "Well I'll be--" he started, and tried hanging a frame from a hook in his hand. The hook split almost before he started swinging it. It was time for nails.

Scotch tape from the kitchen drawer, hammer from the coat closet, a Gerber jar of nails from the basement, and he began.

I sat in Grandma's chair, watching him and laughing silently. One by one, the pictures went up.

"I don't care if it's symmetrical or not. I just want to blast a buncha pictures up there," he said. He looked at me as if asking permission. "Deal?" he asked.

I looked into his eyes. "Deal," I told him.

Oh, man. I just betrayed my entire family and pretty much anyone else who sees that wall.

"Glad you come over 'cause I wasn't sure if I 'as gonna do this or not, and you come over and I decide to do it. See what kin'a influence you got over me?"

My insides cringed. I should have sucked it up and driven home on the freeway.

I sank back into Grandma's chair. We small talked for a bit while he fiddled with the pictures, and, remembering his World War II exploits, I asked if he'd ever been to Thailand.

"Thigh-land?" he asked. "No, I never been to Thigh-land. Why do you wan' know about Thigh-land?"

"I have a friend who went to Thailand for a year," I told him.

"Why would you go to Thigh-land?" he asked, stepping around and back to the pictures. He answered the question for himself: "Study Chinese. It's not a very healthy country to go to right now," he said, maybe to himself.

Four pictures hung in a nearly-straight row on the wall. He looked at me and there was an instant of eye contact before his eyes danced into laughter. He, too, saw how ridiculous the pictures looked.

"They aren't even," he said.

When he turned around, I facepalmed and wondered what my parents would say when they saw the wall. I could hear my dad saying "what on earth?" The wall looked so bad that no one would notice that the pictures were uneven, and if they did, they would assume it was part of the lack of design.

There was still a nail hanging in the middle of the wall, between my dad's and Uncle Steve's senior pictures. He wanted something small to hang there, so I gave him a horizontal 4x6 picture of my immediate family (my parents and siblings and me; his son and daughter-in-law and grandkids) at Uncle Joe's. Framed in black, it fit snugly between the foiling brown frames.

He put another nail in directly below this one and asked for the picture of him and my grandmother. A vertical 4x6, it sat on the shelf in a simple fake-gold frame. There was no hook to hang the frame with, and he mentioned gorilla gluing the whole thing to the wall. "Can't see, can't hear," he muttered and distracted himself with a Cole Porter casette tape.

The wall had pretty much gone to hell, and I felt like I was responsible for it. What could I do? If he had twine, he could tie it around the shelf-stand and hang the frame from there, I suggested.

He didn't have twine, but he had packaging tape. He looped it around the shelf-stand on the back of the frame and hung it from the nail below the family portrait.

To recap, this is what the wall looks like from left to right:

.elaborate fake-gold frame with 11x14 of either my dad or Uncle Chris at about four years old
.dark brown rippling wood frame with 11x14 of Uncle Steve at eighteen (looking slightly left)
.black frame with horizontal 4x6 of my family, below this a simple fake-gold frame with 4x6 of my grandparents
.light brown smooth wood frame with 11x14 of my dad at eighteen (looking slightly right)
.matching elaborate fake-gold frame with 11x14 of either Uncle Chris or my dad at about four years old

"Okay, if I keep messing it up, it won't matter, will it?" he asked me. He straightened my dad's senior picture and for a second I thought the whole thing didn't look half-bad.

Suddenly he realized he'd forgotten Uncle Chris's senior picture, the lone 8x10 sitting in its simple medium-brown wood frame. He decided, with some egging on from me, to put it on top in the center. He dragged a dinette chair into the living room and stood on it. I knelt on the couch, handing up equipment and spotting in case he fell.

"Scotch tape and duct tape. You can't live without 'em," he muttered. I wondered where the duct tape was.

I thought it strange to display the middle child in such a ridiculously prominent location, so I handed him his 50th anniversary frame with wedding-day photos of him and my grandmother. Well now he needed a place for Uncle Chris's picture, and he fit it snugly between the two other senior pictures, hanging down below. He found a spot, stabbed at it with his finger, marked it with Scotch tape, and started the nail. "So much for measuring," he said.

The 4x6 of him and my grandmother slid out of its frame. He knocked it around a bit, trying to straighten it, but without any luck. Finally he gave it to me.

"Get the picture straight and put that sucker back on," he instructed me.

I took it to the kitchen table, emptied the frame, and taped the photo in place. The shelf-stand was in the way. Grandpa stole a guilty look at me and ripped it off.

"Why didn't we think of that before?" he asked me.

I sat back in Grandma's chair, watching him, and then I realized this wasn't as ridiculous as it looked. It was his house, let him have it how he likes, I thought. I've spent a lot of time in college going out of my way to be tacky because I've had a nagging feeling that once I grow up and settle down somewhere, I'm going to have to look respectable and my house will have to look respectable and my picture frames will have to match and hang symmetrically from the wall. It was kind of liberating to known that I can grow up and still be tacky.

I understood, then, what he was trying to do. He was thinking the same way I thought when I attached a hanger to the ceiling with push pins and twine so I could hang my internet cord up or when I carried an old drumhead back to my room to use as a table. He knew where he was going, and now I knew, too, and I could help him without silently mocking him.

"I shouldn't even be doing this," he muttered into the wall. "Someone smart should be doing this."

He wanted the 5x7s of his five grandkids on the wall on the left side, and I went through each one, Scotch-taping the bottoms so the pictures wouldn't fall out. The shelf-stands on the frames were too big to hang the frames on the wall. "I don't dare rip these off," he said, and so he turned the first one over on the table and began nailing the shelf-stand to the back of the frame. He'd had some success with this tactic before, but this frame was thinner. We heard the glass break.

"Oh, sh-t, I mean, shoot," he said. He didn't mean shoot. The glass had shattered and there was a nail sticking out through Emily's shoulder. We cleaned out the glass and, without it, there was plenty of room to tuck the shelf-stand into the frame. We used either tape or gorilla glue to tuck in the other four shelf-stands, then we realized that Anne's frame didn't have a loop to hang on the wall. I found a paperclip and taped it to the back of her frame.

We were done for the day. He stepped back and we admired our work. He asked me if I liked it, and I told him I did--and told him this honestly. I also told him I didn't think my parents would like it, and he was surprised, but I said it didn't matter. I liked it.

My Thigh-land friend once told me I was endearingly tacky, but he hasn't met my grandfather. He is impossible not to love.

Saturday, I went back to Grandpa's house, and he had more pictures up. It looked better, actually, sort of collage-like. Now I got to run off to Greek, but here's a picture of what it looked like on Saturday: