Dear Spike:
Shel Silverstein’s poetry was absurd, farcical and glib. But sometimes — just sometimes — the crusty, cigar-chomping old wordsmith would bang out a rune of such absolute truth as to make God herself say “Amen.”
I don’t remember the first time I heard Silverstein’s poem about household chores. But like most of the
bald bard’s rhymes, it was so simple and silly that it snuggled into a little wrinkle of my memory and stuck there. Every now and again, when I would be tasked with extra work as punishment for having proven myself passingly competent at the work I’d already completed, I would pull it out and dust it off. And there, like Lady Liberty to the huddled masses of my indignity, it would be...
If you have to dry the dishes
And you drop one on the floor —
Maybe they won’t let you
Dry the dishes anymoreAlas, I seldom could bring myself to take Uncle Shelby’s advice, though there were plenty of times I wished I had.
•••
It’s been nearly a decade since I found myself in the florescent-lit bowels of an aircraft carrier, turning angry circles in the placid waters of the northern Persian Gulf. Saddam Hussein’s ragtag air force was violating the U.N.-imposed “no-fly zone” along the 33rd parallel in southern Iraq. Our Navy was preparing a response.
There was plenty of work to be done in the Carrier Intelligence Center where I moiled day after night after day — work that would save and take lives once the order came. But with several of the fleet’s top admirals on their way to oversee operations, one night, it was decided that the best use of my time would be behind a mop, swabbing the deck underneath the office copy machine. I’d done “the best job” at such tasks in the past, the intel officer on duty reasoned to me, “and we wouldn’t want to make a bad impression.”
Right — like bombing the wrong building because we were too busy breaking starch on our dress blues to review the target charts? Yes,
that would be bad, wouldn’t it?
“Aye aye, sir” I said.
•••
I am not suggesting that you ever do anything halfway well — and I’m certainly not insinuating that you sabotage your own work, as Silverstein’s “Dishes” suggests, in an effort to avoid further future tasks.
But you should know up front, kid, that from whom much is impeccably accomplished, much is inequitably expected.
And you’re well on your way to swabbing under the copy machine, shipmate.
•••
Everyone told your mother and I to prepare for your coming like Armageddon. Forget sleep. Forget sanity. Forget personal hygiene. And sex? Never again — “you won’t have time and ain’t gonna want to anyway now that you know the consequences,” someone told us.
We bunkered down, mentally, and prepared for the worst. Your mother started meditating. I canceled all my appointments through 2013. We stored large amounts of canned food in the basement.
Now I’m not saying it has been all gerber daisies, but for the most part your addition to our family has been less like a scene from the Terminator movies and more like something out of a 50s family sitcom. I mean, two weeks of 9 o’clock freakouts not withstanding, you’ve been a pretty happy and low-maintenance baby.
•••
This weekend, for instance:
On Friday evening we took you to a Charlie Chaplain flick at the old Capitol Theater downtown. Yeah, that’s right: a
silent movie. You should have seen the looks on people’s faces when we walked in with your tiny body slung into a pouch, hugging your mom’s chest. She might as well have been wearing a suicide bomb. But the silent Tramp himself produced more decibels than you. You didn’t so much as breathe hard through the entire film — or at anytime during the hour-long discussion that preceded it.
I didn’t hold a stopwatch next to your head or anything, but I’m pretty sure you spent more time this weekend smiling and giggling than whining and crying. Oh, you had your fits, but I’m not sure any lasted longer than it took to check your diaper or get you to you mother’s nearest available breast.
You slept, last night, for a good seven hours straight. That’s a pretty typical night of slumber, for you, which has meant our late-night Star Wars evenings are becoming increasingly infrequent. On the nights when you do wake up — like just about an hour ago, for instance — you use the toilet, eat and fall back asleep in a matter of minutes.
And as of this moment, apparently having recognized the toilet for the modern marvel of engineering and sanitation that it is, you’re going on 30 hours of clean-diaper babydom. I can’t even remember the last time you woke up in the morning with a wet or dirty nappy.
If that’s not all just setting the bar a bit high for yourself, I don’t know what is.
•••
Hey look, I’m not suggesting you stop exceeding our expectations. More importantly, though, just don’t ever stop exceeding your own.
But if every now and then you feel the need to drop a dish, that’s OK. Not everything needs to be perfect. Or even close. And yes, you
can be too good for your own good.
Sometimes, I guess, it's best to simply sit back and watch the dishes pile up on the counter.
Old Shel knew that, too.
He wrote...
Let us leave this place where the smoke blows black
And the dark street winds and bends.
Past the pits where the asphalt flowers grow
We shall walk with a walk that is measured and slow,
And watch where the chalk-white arrows go
To the place where the sidewalk ends.Amen.
Love,
dad
