Making them rather hard for us kids to live up to.
My mother always kept contact paper in the office, on the
second shelf from the top, just a little higher than the kids can reach. I thought, based upon this admittedly skewed
data sample, that contact paper grew on trees, albeit ones that where a little
inconvenient for us vertically challenged beings to climb; but of that notion I
have been disabused.
It all seemed so simple when the adventure began the other
day. I had a poster—just a picture,
actually, a rather impressive effort (if I do say so myself) that came of
combining three separate photographic representations of Tintoretto’s Paradise
into one beautiful, or at least presentable, whole. The original is far better than presentable,
of course, or I would not have coveted the reproduction so much as to spend
three hours with photoshop in mocking it up.
In the words of Wikipedia (waxing more than usually poetic—which, along
with the absence of dates, is generally a sign that they’ve stolen their text
from someone who knew how to write, for example—heaven help us!—an academic):
The crowning production of Tintoretto’s
life, the last picture of any considerable importance which he executed, was
the vast Paradise, in size 22.6 x 9.1 metres (74 ft.
by 30 ft), reputed to be the largest painting ever done upon canvas. A
painted sketch (143 x 362 cm), held in the Louvre
Museum (Paris),
was submitted as a proposal by Tintoretto for a picture in the Ducal
Palace in Venice.
It is a work so stupendous in scale, so colossal in the sweep of its power, so
reckless of ordinary standards of conception or method, so pure an inspiration
of a soul burning with passionate visual imagining and a hand magical to work
in shape and colour, that it has defied the connoisseurship of three centuries,
and has generally (though not with its first Venetian contemporaries) passed
for an eccentric failure; while to a few eyes it seems to be so transcendent a
monument of human faculty applied to the art pictorial as not to be viewed
without awe.
In other words, it’s even prettier than June Duprez.
But don’t tell Harry I said that.
My mockup wasn’t quite so stunning as all that, but it was
good enough that I wasn’t ready to abandon it to dust and the rays of the
morning sun (from those rare occasions when I am home before noon, and the
blinds are recklessly opened, in a way that would distress Mr. Wodehouse). So I set out hopefully to find the precious
paper which, while it might not be the panacea for all decorating woes, would
at least serve to keep a pretty good print job from fading before the other Mr.
Wodehouse could say What Ho?
I very quickly found that they don’t stock contact paper
like they used to.
There should be a fourth fiber here …
I found construction paper, cartridge paper, tissue paper,
wrapping paper, cardboard, sketch paper, artist’s canvas, and mattes. I bought three strings of beads, two spools
of white cotton yarn, a passel of seventy-five-percent-off Christmas
paraphernalia, a picture frame that was the wrong size, and black and cream
ribbons. I was the favorite customer of
JoAnn’s, Michael’s, and Benjamin Franklin’s.
I will not be naming any of my children JoAnn, Michael, or
Benjamin. Why they can’t give craft
stores sensible names like Chick-fil-A I don’t know.
As I approached the final register, circa 3:45, I found my heart failing me. I simply didn’t want to do it any
longer. My wallet couldn’t take it; and
what’s more, I had done my five questions for the day. I didn’t want to ask. I screwed my courage to the sticking point,
and leaned across the counter. In
hushed, reverential tones I asked the clerk …
“Excuse me, do you have any contact paper?”
The lady—a petite sixty-five-year-old with a heavy French
accent—made me repeat my humiliation like a replay of Versailles. I spoke the question again, somewhat
louder. She shook her head, as one full
of the regret.
This kind of regret.
“No,” she said. “I do
not think we carry it.”
Then she got on the phone—on the phone!—and paged the
manager. Well, at least paged
someone. A younger woman, who looked
less like a person who did crafts and more like a professional
something-or-other, and who confirmed that, indeed, they usually carried
contact paper, but they were out.
Out? OUT?!!
With a sinking heart, I paid for the partridge-painted
napkins, and departed. At least there
had only been two other people in the store when the manager was paged. And they hadn’t used my name. But there was no doubt about it: I was a
crafty failure.
And in the parking lot, I realized the full extent of my
defeat. I didn’t even want the contact
paper any more. In fact, I was rather
afraid to go looking for it. A deep
conviction had settled into my soul that, in point of fact, if I had the
contact paper in my hands I would be incapable of using it. It would bubble up beneath my fingers, like
the so many sheets that had disgraced the family book covers beneath those same
fingers many years before, and my final incompetence in the matter of papering
papers into posterish pictures would be established, so that not even the love
of Tintoretto could save me.
Poor Me.
I wish I could say that the Doctor came and saved me, like
he saved Harry. But that would doubtless
have been a much longer story, and one less edifyingly tragic. Although, come to think of it, I’m at home
right now, and maybe my mother knows where one can buy …
No. Scratch
that. I’ll just borrow some contact
paper. In fact, I think I know exactly
where it is right now. Second shelf from
the top, just a little higher than the kids can reach …
Cheerio, my good men!
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