The mother--The elder--The child

I believe somewhere down the line I mentioned that my pants are now covered in paint splotches. The variety of colours grows week by week, as more and more jobs pile up. One of the perks of renovation work for someone like me is the frightfully intimate pictures that get painted of the inhabitants of the brick-and-mortar houses. Today the paint splotches reminded me of some of these characters. They are not characters in the common understanding of the term; they are all more or less regular people, the exposition of whom would make a decent one-act play. (That's my way of praising the reality in which these people live, in my twisted, outsider, some would say single-minded weirdo way.) Are they characters or archetypes? How much of this is must my own imaginative filler (as much as I rtry to suppress it)? How common are these situations? At last, a question I can answer: very. If you do jobs for enough people, the vast majority of them will be normal; another way of saying that the majority is the majority. But I've rambled on for too long without getting to it. So, we have:

The Mother: dark eggshell yellow and sky-blue splotch on pants... her days are filled with cuddling her infant... lots and lots of television... talks to the contractors (long history-related diatribes on which the contractors pick up readily)... letting those nurturing instincts splash over anyone who enters the houshold... wants the basement painted bright colours... "like the sky", "pastel tones"... crawling out of her skull with boredom sometimes... was a teacher in previous life... break in monotony comes with arguing with board bureaucrats over maternity payments... even anger tempered by the child bouncing in her lap... wants to know about my life... puts people at ease... wants husband to be more handy... "hockey is not a religion!"

The Elder: primer stains and lighter eggshell yellow stains on my pants... has a cought that leaves me shuddering... "how does her chest not explode"... climbing stairs a Sysiphean effort... gave contractors coffee and coffee cakes... long awkward break making small talk... showed contractors pictures of grandchildren now in the suburbs... husband recently dead... eyes welling up with tears... "do you need anything?"... our empathy turning to ire as our productivity is lowered... tendency to nitpick... "she hovers like a goddamn vampire"... addicted to television... could have been mother to Sarah Goldfarb... church choir music blares every morning, then Maury Povich...

The Child: did not underswtand what we were doing at her house... definitely not my inner child... channeled Marquez when she said: "this rock is a dinosaur egg"... liked to get in the way of enormous pointy crowbars... shouted as we tamped the earth... something about Santa Claus in July... big gentle contractor boss bear made her cry (for her own good)... proud of her tricycle...

What to make of these? What of anything? In the near future, I promise to give a sample of the dialogue in my endless head. (It is probably the dialogue that is endless, not the head.)

Consider: "So you can't dance? Not at all? Not even one step?... How can you say that you've taken any trouble to live when you won't even dance?"