The other day, as the first leaf of autumn descended onto the front lawn, my youngest child turned to me, his eyes glowing with excitement and his hands fidgeting to be grasping the handle of a tool that was almost an extension of himself. “It’s time for the raking Olympics, isn’t it, Daddy?”
“Soon, son,” I assured him. “We must be patient.”
I wish. Actually, the exchange went more like this: Groan. “We’re not going to do that same thing as last year?"
“The real Olympics happen every year. Why shouldn’t ours?” I don’t mind bending the truth for a good cause.
But I know it is too late. He has already succumbed to the same cynicism and distrust of authority that infected his older brother and sister. How is it, I often wonder aloud as I board the train for work at South Orange station, that the children of America lose their spiritual innocence so soon?
In our house it happened something like this. Last autumn, in a generous effort not to keep all the joys of yard work to myself, I assembled rakes of various sizes on the front lawn. Then, summoning my brood, I announced the start of the raking Olympics. The kids would be raking alongside me, and I would be watching them closely, awarding points for technique, attitude and stamina. The first-prize winner had to have the most points in all three categories. But there would also be a prize for the most improved at raking.
A stunned silence greeted this announcement. Finally, one of the older ones asked, “What is the prize?”
To be honest I hadn’t gotten this far in my calculations.
“The prize,” I began while mentally scrambling to come up with one, “will be a certificate with a gold, embossed pile of leaves on it. It will say 'Raker of the Year' in fancy, silver lettering. Mommy and I will present it to the winner in a special ceremony.”
“What does ‘embossed’ mean?” one of the others asked.
“Look it up,” I snapped.
Our Olympics began well enough. Each competitor was assigned an “event,” piling up the leaves on a sheet, piling them up again after someone walked through them, and then, when this seemed to have gone on long enough, dragging the pile onto the street.
Soon, however, I began to hear murmurs of discontent.
“Raking seems kind of pointless,” my middle child observed. “I mean you rake and then more leaves fall.”
Now this was just the kind of subversive talk we couldn’t afford to have if morale was to remain high.
“Remember,” I warned, “becoming Raker of the Year is about attitude, not just technique.” He shrugged and went back to his piling.
But, once kindled, the brushfires of sedition are the hard to put out, especially when Mommy is not around to back you up. Soon he and his older sister were exchanging eye-rolls, sarcastic comments, and, I suspected, phone numbers of child-labor lawyers.
I pointed to their younger brother, who was using a plastic toy rake to amass a small pile of his own near the front steps.
“Now that is an Olympic champion. He doesn’t complain. Or disappear inside the house for a 15-minute drink of water. He keeps going.”
“I was texting,” explained my daughter. Then, realizing how fishy this sounded, she added, “Mary wanted to know the homework.”
We needed to maintain our sense of purpose. But how? Shifting from the Olympics to a World Series? A yard work “American Idol”?
“What if we didn’t rake at all?”
This question, which came from my middle child, startled me in its simplicity. And because it had often occurred to me.
Still, the last thing for any self-respecting authority figure to do is to reveal his own doubts. “That would be very, very bad,” I told him. “Eventually, the leaves would pile up so high on the front lawn that we wouldn’t be able to see out the windows.”
Eyes widening in horror at this prospect, his younger brother speeded up the pace of his raking.
But I had forgotten that science is part of the curriculum at Jefferson School. “No they wouldn’t,” my middle child told me. “They would decompose and just become part of the grass.”
“Eventually,” I pointed out. “But before they did, the grass would probably die.”
Still, like many a scientific truth, this has to be taken on faith. In fact, over the course of years of raking, I have given serious weight to the possibility that we have it backwards. Maybe the leaves are supposed to become part of the grass, and raking represents yet another example of human meddling with nature.
I could readily imagine some alternate-universe South Orange whose inhabitants had nothing but affection for trees that were on the verge of shedding their foliage. “About time,” they would say in farmer-like admiration of some many-branched specimen, “The grass sure needs it.”
But here my kids and I were standing on a lawn that was very much a part of this universe. We had been going about our task for more than an hour, and it was hard to tell whether things looked better or worse than when we started. So the notion that we were keeping up appearances wasn’t going to fly either.
And now my kids were expecting some other answer that didn’t have “2 plus 2 equals 5” written all over it.
“The truth is,” I said, leaning on my own rake for balance, “ that I don’t really know why we do this.” Then, after a thoughtful pause, “Mommy thinks it’s a good idea.”
“But didn’t Mommy think it was a good idea to drive to Maine that time we all got sick and the hotel didn’t know we were coming?”
“No,” I had to admit, “that was Daddy. Daddy thought that was a good idea.”
“Oh.”
We were like some tribe that had lost its high priestess, going through a ritual that we didn’t quite understand in the hopes that she would come home soon and explain it to us. The realization that this was our position slowed everybody down, even the youngest and most enthusiastic of us, whom I had considered a shoe-in for the grand prize. My 5-year-old had a thoughtful, distracted air as he returned to his task.
I thought I knew what was going on in his head. Was it really such a big deal to be Raker of the Year? Or were the others right that Daddy was probably just going to draw some lame certificate with gold and silver crayons? And Daddy wasn’t even very good at drawing.
But I wasn’t at all prepared for how far he’d taken such speculations. “Those e-mails,” he finally asked me, “from Santa about how we should empty the dishwasher every night so we don’t get coal for Christmas: you just write those yourself, don’t you?”
It was the beginning of the end.
No comments:
Post a Comment