Anyone Can Paint!

I say the last word – professionals - with solemn respect for the deep inner workings of the secret knowledge combined with unattainable skill passed on from generation to generation to chosen few through some clandestine initiation rite.

Professionals?!!! She laughs uproariously as if I just told her a particularly funny joke. Painting is not just for ‘professionals’.  Anyone can paint. You and I can paint that room in one evening.  

I’ve known Karrie for years. She is a former military, civil engineer AND a middle school algebra teacher. I’m not kidding. She’s definitely not an impulsive type. She is half-German! But, she is not a painter - at least not that I am aware.  

Despite her uproarious laughter, she sounds serious like she really meant what she said.

I stare at her like a convoluted algebra problem, the two sides of this equation simply not adding up.   

As if to clarify my dilemma and seal her statement, she repeats it, this time slowly, making sure I understand every word:

You and I can paint that room in one evening. After your kids are in bed.  Before YOU go to bed.

Her words linger between us trying to decide which way they should go.

I really can’t explain what happened next. Whether it was her rock-solid confidence? Or my momentary lapse in judgment where I forgot all about myself and latched onto her words… actually believing what she said….

But in that split-second of extraordinary lucidity or extraordinary lunacy, I felt something in me getting unhinged, and before I knew what I was doing, I blurted out:

Let’s do it.  

And as if to seal the certificate of my insanity, I repeat it:

Let’s do it next week.  

And thus I took a leap of unbridled faith into the techno-color abyss of Behr and Sherwin Williams.