Dear Blog Reader:
I hope that this finds you doing well. I also hope that it
finds you taking the first steps toward the successful completion of your
resolutions for 2015. I am pleased to say that I am ¾ of the way to my goal. I
resolve to get over this stupid cold. The mode of mortality for Ebola is the
hyperactivity of the immune system to the infection. Your body is overwhelmed
by your own immune system. After this cold, I am fairly certain that I am toast
around Ebola. My immune system went way over the top trying to kick this stupid
little cold. I mean it was a way disproportional response to the common cold.
At one point in time, snot was dripping out of my nose
unprovoked. One night I woke up and had to sneeze so hard that I got a bloody
nose, and I mean a very bloody nose; not just a couple of drips. If there are
any eye doctors out there, maybe you can answer this. Can your sinuses get so
plugged up that the pressure distorts the shape of your eyes? I know that they
water like crazy, but I could swear that my eye sight was blurry for 2 days,
and I think that it was my sinuses changing the shape of my eyes. I was so sick that I did not ride my bike for
an entire week. That means that I was weak and nearing death.
I would sit down for a few minutes and a pile of discarded
snot filled Kleenexes would quickly grow on the night stand, the coffee table,
the ottoman. That is when a blast from the past hit me in the face. Punched me
in the gut is a better metaphor. I have been sifting through a memory more and
more often all fall. I have known that it would be a blog. I have been holding
back because it is a petty memory, and a memory that makes me feel
uncomfortable.
I could rightfully been described as a messy kid. I was the
pigpen of my Peanut’s community. Mrs. Quackenbush (true name) gave me numerous
demerits for the pit that was my desk; pencils, papers, half used tablets,
rocks, and strings. I believe that there may have been a pocket knife or two at
the bottom of there somewhere. Yes it was a simpler time. It was before all of
you people out there started having psychopaths and sending them to school. You
ruined a very good show and tell subject. It wasn’t only my desk. My papers
were messy. I hated the wasted space of margins. I would start on the left edge
(of the paper) and go to the right edge breaking in the middle of words without
thought of syllables or h yphens. No, I was not being harassed by a skinflint
parent or grandparent. It was all self-generated.
That was just 1st grade. It has followed me all
of my life. In 4th grade Mrs. Ash held up a paper of mine in front
of the class and asked “who owns these chicken scratches?” Granted, I had not
put my chicken scratched name on the paper. But she was obviously trying to
shame me into better penmanship. She knew whose chicken scratches those were.
They are quite distinctive. I showed her. It is still horrible. I write a
handwritten letter to my kids nearly every week. After 7 years, there are words
that they just have to kind of guess at. My ing’s are especially non distinct.
Obviously, there were parent teacher conferences. Mom and
dad got the message. “You’re son is going to turn into the unibomber if you don’t
do something about his messiness, he is going to live in a tarpaper shack and
build letter bombs and write a manifesto if you don’t nip this in the bud.” Mom
sprang into action. She went to the nearest Hallmark store and bought a
motivational poster. It is a poster with a messy haired little boy eating ice
cream. It is obviously a hot day. The ice cream is melting down his front, on
to the table and the floor. His face is covered and sticky. The next panel he
has cleaned everything up and his mom is beaming at her considerate son.
This poster was hung on the wall at the foot of my bed. I
looked at it when I woke up and swung my feet over the edge of the bed to step
on some discarded toy strewn on the floor. I saw it as I straightened the bed enough
to lay down in the bed at night.
In the previous paragraph, I used present tense verbs in
describing a poster that has not been in print for 30 years. That is because it
is still present in my mind. As the Kleenex piles grew this week, he was there
right in my mind telling me to pick up those nasty things or you are going to
burn for being an inconsiderate person.
I don’t think that it worked. Sure I cleaned up my snot rags.
However, that was because they were about to topple over onto my pillow. It is
a wonder that I didn’t rebel and rip down that stupid little kid and clean up
my wall. It stayed in the same place on the wall all of the way through high
school. However, it did not go with me to college.
Did it teach me something hanging up there with its
accusatory cuteness? It taught me to eat ice cream very quickly. A considerate
person doesn’t wait long enough to let the ice cream melt. That’s insensitive.
I had some other questions about consideration during this time. Mom’s vacuuming
during Road Runner on Saturday morning in the TV room did not seem very
considerate. I could not hear any of the beep beeps. Okay, it wasn’t that
important for the Road Runner but it was crucial for the Bugs Bunny toons. Also
why was battling entropy the gold standard for measuring consideration? What
about helping little old ladies across the street, not speaking until spoken
to, or not running with scissors? I was grade A considerate on all of those
things.
Don’t we all bring our scars from our parent’s good
intentions? Then we wrestle with them through early adulthood and pass along
some version to our kids, which is why the lovely Miss Beverly and I gave our
kids free counselling sessions for graduation gifts. Now that’s considerate. Even more important as you create a life with
your spouse you have to meld two levels of consideration together. There were
fights and discussions about the level of cleanliness at the Sharritt house.
Certainly, the lovely Miss Beverly had the power of the media on her side. The
Big Comfy Couch had the 10 second tidy. That seemed terrible misleading to me.
Here is a task that is so despicable that we have to perform movie magic on it
and condense 15 minutes of clean up into 10 seconds.
At one point in time, we just admitted our differences and I
would have the kids clean the house with mom’s eyes. She could see things that
the rest of us had become inoculated to. That worked very well. The kids
understood that there were different standards of cleanliness; that cleanliness
was in the eye of the beholder. They were used to it. They saw it in their
everyday lives. Some friend’s houses looked like they had never been played in
and you had to take off your shoes at the front door. Other friends you left on
your shoes for fear of stepping in a sharp toy as you ran pell mell through the
house. So that worked for them.
The other thing that worked was the jobs list. This was the
brain child of the lovely and very smart Miss Beverly. She developed a list of
all of the jobs in the house. Each job had a point value. Each week she would
print out the list and circled the jobs that needed done each week. For
example, cleaning the toilet was an every week job, cleaning the windows was a
twice a year job. The jobs would be tallied and the total divided by four. The
family could pick any jobs on the list to get their total. We were always big
fans of toilet cleaning. There is something about swishing toxic chemicals
around for a few seconds and earning an inordinate 3 points. And we would go
around picking our chores and within a half hour the house would be clean.
I suppose that 40 years from now Ben and Grace will be
adding up how many points cleaning their dirty Kleenexes are worth. It is
amazing how a good intention can leave a powerful mess to clean up. Mom should
have been more considerate.
Take care
Roger
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