Old Enough to Repaint

For the last two days, dear friends (and former students) Joey and Patricia were here to repaint my bedroom. When my daughter was living here, she asked for purple. It was nice, but I'm really not a purple person. (Maybe the trauma of "one-eyed, one-horned, flyin' purple people eater" forever killed purple for me?) I opted for a calming green, Benjamin Moore titled "soft fern," although it looks like sage to me. I am beyond happy with the result. My bedroom is now peaceful and tranquil and soft (as in "soft fern"). It's all good.

So needless to say, a song lyric crept into my brain as I contemplated this color transformation. Neil Young's "Tell Me Why" from After the Gold Rush took center stage. In the soundtrack of my college sophomore year, After the Gold Rush is right up there. How many nights did I fall asleep to that album? The line from "Tell Me Why" that connects to the painting is here:

Tell me why, tell me why
Is it hard to make arrangements with yourself
When you're old enough to repaint
But young enough to sell

Or at least I thought those were the lyrics. I mean, they made sense to me. We're talking about a car here, right? "Old enough to repaint, but young enough to sell." And metaphorically, the line implies that you have the option to spruce yourself up or . . . give up.

Well, now in the Internet Age, I had to google the lyrics to find that every lyrics site had the same line: "When you're old enough to repay . . . " I'll give you a minute or two here to think about that.

Time's up. What the fuck does that even mean? "Old enough to repay?" Repay what? I'm sorry, I may be dense, but that line just makes no sense to me.

I continued my googling to find that most of the online discussions of the line seemed to agree that the word was "repay," although there were many, many people who said, "I always thought the line was 'repaint'." But they didn't make a compelling and defensive argument for it.

So I'll make one here. "Repay" makes absolutely no sense. I have no idea what Neil intended (and I don't have the album sleeve here to check the lyrics) but even if he did originally write "repay," I'm willing to bet that he would agree that "repaint" is a better word choice. Does anyone want to argue that with me? Bring it on!

Anyway, I am old enough to repaint. I'll leave it there.