No indeed, Grandpa was no handy man. He was, in fact, a real klutz. And Grandma missed no opportunity to disclose Grandpa’s klutziness. Very early on Grandma told me that she once asked Grandpa for a shelf in the bathroom to put towels on. Grandpa proceeded to take some old lumber and hammer it together to make a shelf. When Grandma put a towel on it, the shelf shifted under the weight of the towel to one side. When she put a second towel on it, it shifted to the other side. Grandma said that she then took “that useless thing” and threw it onto the scrap lumber pile in the yard.

Grandpa’s pièce de résistance of klutziness was his attempt to paint the ridge pole on their house in Falcon Heights. As always, before doing something that could not possibly end well, he waited until Grandma had gone somewhere. Then he took out the ladder, opened the gallon can of green paint, armed himself with a paintbrush and climbed up onto the roof. He would have had enough trouble keeping his balance without a large and weighty paint can in one hand and a brush in the other. And it hadn’t occurred to him to pour some paint into a smaller container.

The inevitable happened. Grandpa lost his balance, slipped and let go of the can of paint. It – and fortunately not Grandpa – rolled down the roof, over the gutter and emptied its contents all over the cement patio below. Grandpa’s first thought was a very good one. He would need something to soak up the paint. The thought that followed was less so: sand. Grandpa poured a large quantity of sand into the paint in a misguided attempt to soak it up. The sand only made the puddle larger, much larger.

Knowing that Grandma could come back at any minute, Grandpa made a further mistake. He grabbed the garden hose and squirted water into the puddle of oil-based paint and sand. Most of dark green paint floated on the water and ran quickly over the edge of the cement into the bed of roses surrounding the patio. Unfortunately, not all of the paint floated. Enough remained on the patio to leave an ugly green stain.

The rest of the story goes like all of the stories about Grandpa’s klutziness. Grandma yelled. Grandpa yelled back, probably blaming someone or something else for his actions. And Grandma told everyone about just how dumb Grandpa had been – again.