Casting Pearls to Swine

“Do you want to hear a dirty joke?” My grandpa asked me this. My dad was in the room. I was six-years-old.

My dad and his father-in-law had just interrupted their own conversation—one that I had been ignoring until now—for this event. As a six year old, I was aware of the following things:

My dad was in the room, so the joke couldn’t be too dirty.
Dirty jokes of any kind were not encouraged.
They were expecting a certain reaction from me.

When kids in 1st grade ask, “Do you want to hear a dirty joke?” the other kids in the vicinity have an instant attraction to the comedian. It’s not a moth-to-the-flame kind of attraction it’s more like super-electromagnet-to-little-metal-shavings attraction. It’s instant and unwavering. So, that’s what I figured was expected of me and I gave it to them. I spun away from the toy cars with which I was playing, scooted in a crab-crawling sort of way to the feet of my grandpa while exclaiming, “Yeah!”

“A pig fell in the mud,” Grandpa said.

I waited.

“Do you want to hear a clean joke?” Grandpa asked.

”OK.”

“He took a bath.”

They were chuckling. I felt embarrassed. I’m sure to the people in the room, I appeared to be merely disappointed, but that wasn’t it. In a six-year-old way, I felt like I had sold off some of my character, but there was no payoff. I had behaved in a way that I normally would not have only to fulfill what I thought was an expectation for my behavior. It turns out that what I thought was an expectation was really a little test.

I went back to my toys. I continued to be embarrassed and began to feel angry, but I don’t think anybody knew that. Dad and Grandpa went back to their conversation.

It is interesting to watch little kids. There is so much more going on in their heads than they let on. They are not simply playing and reacting. They are thinking, learning, assessing, and hypothesizing, too. Sometimes, I think we sell kids short on emotions, too. Lacking the vocabulary to define what they are feeling and thinking has no bearing on the internal reality.

The dirty joke incident was not in vain, though. I remember deciding that I would not do things just because other people wanted me to do them. I would do what I would do. Of course, I have failed that promise billions of times in the last couple decades, and never without consequence. I’m not a people-pleaser as much as I am attempted-people-pleaser. I want to make people happy and I want conflicts resolved, but that rarely happens. (In fact, if I try to make you happy and you don’t get happy in the next five seconds, I’ll probably do something to make you angrier out of pure frustration, but that’s another posting for another day.)

A couple weeks ago, Clara Grace—our two-year-old—was fooling around with her food. To her, it was a funny game. To me, it was a mess to clean up. I told her to stop it, but she didn’t. So I got close to her face, looked her in the eye, and told her “no” as firmly as I could, and I packed it with my irritation and exhaustion for extra measure. She cried, but it wasn’t the cry of a two-year-old that was forbidden to play or a cry of defiance or of frustration. It was embarrassment. She put one hand over her mouth and another on her forehead. When I looked at her, she slid the hand on her forehead over her eyes. I was so surprised; I didn’t realize two-year-olds could be embarrassed. Aren’t they the most uninhibited people in the world?

I picked her up out of the high chair and held her and told her how much I liked her. At the moment, it seemed to be an inadequate consolation.

It made me wonder how often I diagnose her emotions correctly and how often I will inflict an unnecessary embarrassment on her in the years to come.

Clara Grace has a little farm set now and it came with a pig that is permanently muddy. She carries it around saying, “Pig in the mud. Pig in the mud.” I wish she would stop telling dirty jokes.

The Clothes Make the Man

I noticed a little while ago that I behave a little better if I am wearing nice clothes. If I am donning a button up shirt, slacks, and a tie, my patience and professionalism go up, my confidence is boosted, and I do believe my voice takes on a slightly lower, manlier tone. I even fell a mite taller. I drive a little slower and am more gracious to other drivers and pedestrians. And on the days I tie a Double-Windsor around my neck, well!—I could be positively civil to Aunt Sponge, Aunt Spiker, the Queen of Hearts, the Wicked Witch of the West, every fairytale stepmother and step sister, and Rachel Lynde.*

Do clothes make the man?

Conversely, if I wear those clothes to the auto parts store, I don’t feel quite as confident or adept as when I sport old jeans and a greasy t-shirt. And, my driving isn’t so polite. (“Out of my way, ye peasants, for 'tis I, Toad the Traffic-queller, Toad the Mighty, Toad the Scorcher!")**

In fact, Kenneth Grahame’s Toad is a perfect example of this. Whenever Toad takes up a new, eccentric, and expensive hobby, he must have the clothes to go with it. His friends Rat, Mole, and Badger know this, and when they take it upon themselves to cure Toad of his addiction to automobiles, the first thing they do is tell Toad to take his driving togs off. Here; read as Badger begins the process:

“Now then!” he said to the Toad, when the four of them stood together in the Hall, “first of all, take those ridiculous things off!”

`Shan't!” replied Toad, with great spirit. “What is the meaning of this gross outrage? I demand an instant explanation.”

“Take them off him, then, you two,” ordered the Badger briefly.

[Rat and Mole] had to lay Toad out on the floor, kicking and calling all sorts of names, before they could get to work properly. Then the Rat sat on him, and the Mole got his motor-clothes off him bit by bit, and they stood him up on his legs again. A good deal of his blustering spirit seemed to have evaporated with the removal of his fine panoply. Now that he was merely Toad, and no longer the Terror of the Highway, he giggled feebly and looked from one to the other appealingly, seeming quite to understand the situation.

See? I think Toad and I may be a bit of the same mettle. Toad does carry it a bit far, though—farther than me, I’m sure. I mean, his personality being affected by his clothing is so strong it nearly prevents him from escaping jail. The jailor’s daughter has a plan that will benefit toad and her poor aunt.

“Toad,” she said presently, “just listen, please. I have an aunt who is a washerwoman.”

“There, there,” said Toad, graciously and affably, “never mind; think no more about it. I have several aunts who ought to be washerwomen.”

“Do be quiet a minute, Toad,” said the girl. “You talk too much, that's your chief fault, and I'm trying to think, and you hurt my head. As I said, I have an aunt who is a washerwoman…I think if she were properly approached…you could come to some arrangement by which she would let you have her dress and bonnet and so on, and you could escape from the castle as the official washerwoman. You're very alike in many respects--particularly about the figure.”

“We're not,” said the Toad in a huff. “I have a very elegant figure--for what I am.”

“So has my aunt,” replied the girl, “for what she is. But have it your own way. You horrid, proud, ungrateful animal, when I'm sorry for you, and trying to help you!”

“Yes, yes, that's all right; thank you very much indeed,” said the Toad hurriedly. “But look here! You wouldn't surely have Mr. Toad of Toad Hall, going about the country disguised as a washerwoman!”

And then Toad, dressed as a washerwoman, realizes he has no money to board a train. But, with his new clothes, his new role is no trouble at all.

“O, sir!” said Toad, crying afresh, “I am a poor unhappy washerwoman, and I've lost all my money, and can't pay for a ticket, and I must get home to-night somehow, and whatever I am to do I don't know. O dear, O dear!”

“That's a bad business, indeed,” said the engine-driver reflectively. “Lost your money--and can't get home--and got some kids, too, waiting for you, I dare say?”

“Any amount of 'em,” sobbed Toad. “And they'll be hungry--and playing with matches--and upsetting lamps, the little innocents!--and quarrelling, and going on generally. O dear, O dear!”

Well, anyway, how is it that clothing can hold such sway over some of us? I suppose the first step in solving such a problem is admitting it, but it may also mean that I’ll have to stop selecting clothes on the basis of price alone. Generally I’ll ignore size if it’s somewhat close and color if it’s not too offensive and cut or style if it means saving $30. But, I might be selling my character short here; I may be putting myself in moral danger!

I have been aware of this, I think, for quite some time in some sort of semi-conscious way, but then I discovered how L. M. Montgomery articulated it so well through her character, Anne of Green Gables. She said, “It is so much easier being good when one is wearing fashionable clothing.”

Well. What else can I say? Nothing, except that it appears we can give people fine clothing to wear. I don’t mean clothing of threads and buttons, but character clothing—a clothing of expectation. Margery Sharp’s Miss Bianca said it so well when she mused that “People told they are generous and open-minded often discover that they really are, so that flattery of the right kind…does nothing but good.”

* I noticed immediately that my haphazard list of children’s books’ antagonists were all women. That wasn’t intentional; they were just the ones that came to mind. Who are the really evil male antagonists of children’s literature? Surely there are some.

** Read The Wind in the Willows online!

Vicarious Pleasures

Clara Grace barely plays with her toys. Well, she plays with them about 5 percent of the time. The rest of the time she is playing with boxes of Macaroni-and-Cheese from the kitchen shelf, pots and pans, digital cameras that she extracts from camera bags, chargers, phones, doors, CDs, and toilet paper (thank goodness not the toilet.) She even slides chairs up to a light switch and will spend several minutes turning the light on or off. “Light on!” she announces, and then, “Light off!” Over and over again.

But when kids come over, she inevitably follows the guests into the nursery. The visitors start playing with her toys, usually with vigor. She will stand there and watch, suddenly desirous of this toy that has been in her nursery for six months or more. Sometimes I think, “Why don’t you go play with the light switch? That’s what you really want to do.” As soon as the guest moves on to a new toy, Clara Grace rediscovers the recently abandoned one. As she plays with it, I watch to see if she wonders why she hasn’t been enjoying this thing everyday. It seems to be her new favorite pastime.

There is something, isn’t there, to watching a person thoroughly enjoy something? When a person is completely passionate about an object or a hobby that I had previously ignored, I see it in a new light. It’s the reason why I ever tried to pick up the game of golf. Another example: in Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus, the fictionalized Antonio Salieri lusts after Mozart’s seemingly divine skill in composing. Shaffer—through Salieri—describes Mozart’s music in the most enticing terms. It’s not just that the musical portraiture is poetic--it’s authentic. Suddenly I hear Mozart like I never did before and wonder why I have not been listening to Mozart everyday.

But anyway, one reason Clara Grace watches these children play with her nearly-forgotten toys is that we have worked diligently with her in teaching her to share. She’s not perfect at it, but she does pretty well. When she begins to get antsy about wanting something—say a stuffed horse—that someone else is using, she’ll chant, “Share. Share the horse. Share. Share the horse.”

Jut before Halloween, we decided to teach Clara Grace how to trick-or-treat. She still doesn’t quite have the concept down, but she’s farther along then the last two years. On her first try, she knocked on the door and said “Trick-or-Treat” when we opened it, as instructed. We dropped candy in her bucket to activate Pavlovian learning. Then, keeping in mind our manners lessons, we said, “What do you say?”

“More candy,” she replied.

“No,” we laughed, “what do you say?”

“More candy…please,” she tried.

“Say, ‘thank you’”, we prompted.

“Morecandymorecandymorecandy!” The volume was rising.

“Say, ‘thank you’”, we urged.
Then she remembered her reasoning skills. ”Share! Share the candy,” she said.

She ate the candy and she thoroughly enjoyed it. I watched her suck on this cheap treat, saturated with drool and pleasure. She reveled in it so much, it made me want to try it. I like salty snacks, not sweets--and especially not cheap sweets. But, maybe I had missed some sublte joy.

It's like "Three Dog Night." It's childish, unrefined, and simple, but I like it. Whenever I listen to "Never Been to Spain", I feel a little silly, like I am relishing cheap candy. So, I tried the cheap candy again. Apparently, not all similes can be extended in reality. And, I guess that's why I don't golf anymore, either.

Embarrassment

My greatest embarrassment this year happened on Thursday, and it started when I gave my class hot chocolate. It was a cold, blustery day, and I was feeling the holiday spirits drifting in. We were preparing for that night’s Holiday Sing in which all the third and fourth graders would perform with voice, kazoo, and percussive instruments for a multitude of parents and one senator. The kids had practiced since October and they really sounded good.

Last week, a parent had a brilliant idea for the Holiday Sing. She asked each kid to bring in a holiday picture of him or herself. Her intention was to scan all the pictures in and make a huge digital slideshow to display while the children sang. The only problem was, she didn’t follow through. The pictures came in, but she did not collect them and assemble the slideshow. I guilted myself into not only collecting the pictures and creating a slideshow, but also into purchasing material to build large symmetric screens on either side of the stage. And considering the performance was only a few hours away, I was beginning to feel panicky. This is my flimsy excuse for what happened next.

I wanted to get the screens raised. Fifteen minutes was all I needed, and I asked the class to work in their Reading Workbook. It was intelligent work that we were ready to do anyway, and it was review. I thought, “Why not give the kids hot chocolate while they work?” I cracked the windows open to let some of the winter in and broke out the hot chocolate.

In hindsight, I guess their reaction was predictable. I asked them to be calm, to be mature, to work quietly in their seats for fifteen minutes. But it wasn't happening.

“What if we have to go to the bathroom?” one student asked.

“Wait,” I replied. “Wait fifteen minutes. Don’t leave your seats for any reason; I’ll be right back.” And as extra precaution, I detailed my expectations for how the class should look and sound and what they should be doing.

They were antsy and squirrelly. It took ten minutes before I felt they were calm and focused. Then I went to work on the screens.

I came back sooner than expected. Mrs. Ferguson, the teacher next door, told me what happened. The kids had all come running and screaming into the hall while some teachers were administering assessments in the hallway. Apparently, after I’d left, some kids started talking and laughing, and other kids took it upon themselves to be the quiet police and wrote messages on the blackboard such as “Be quite pepole!” Then one boy ran up to the blackboard to add his two cents, but he spilled his hot chocolate everywhere. He had taken his lid off. The spilled hot chocolate triggered the mass hysteria.

Mrs. Ferguson came in and tried to quell the tide of children flowing in the swell of noise and bedlam. Then Parker knocked his drink over.

I was angry that the children had behaved this way, and embarrassed that other teachers knew about it and became involved. To have a teacher tell me all the gruesome details of my class’s behavior was humiliating.

I went into the classroom. The kids seemed oblivious to their own behavior. So, I took ten minutes to tell the children how frustrated, embarrassed, and disappointed I was. They knew what I expected of them, and they completely missed the mark. During my very stern lecture, one boy kept raising his hand. I kept telling him to put it down. Eventually, I asked, “Do you have a comment?”

“No,” he said.

“Do you have something to say in your defense?”

“No,” he said. “I have a question.”

“What is it?” I asked.

“Can we have extra recess?”

I couldn’t believe it. “Did you hear anything I just said?”

He looked confused. “Yeah,” he said, as if to ask who could not have heard what I just said. It was more like he was saying, “Yes, but you are completely irrelevant.”

“No,” I said. “No, you will not have extra recess. You will lose five minutes of your recess for asking that question.”

He looked like a contestant in a game that had just broken a secret rule that no one could know about, and he was trying to figure it out.

I spent the rest of the day being angry.

And then I found a toy on the floor. Toys are not allowed at school, so this made me just a little more upset. I picked it up. It was a spin-off of the classic nun toy boxing puppet, except it was a clown. When I held it and squeezed the triggers, it’s puny arms flailed out comically. It looked ridiculous. When I let it punch the palm of my hand, it felt weak and ineffective. It was exactly how I felt--ridiculous and impotent.

Later, in the middle of the night, it occurred to me that I am often on the other side of this scene. God has given me explicit expectations concerning my behavior and I often choose not to fulfill them. Then, an accuser comes to Him pointing his finger at me and tells God everything I am doing wrong, as if God didn’t know. “Look!” he says, “Look at him! He claims to be a follower of You, yet he commits the same offences over and over again! He is taking the breath You gave him and uses it to speak unkind words and to do evil things.” And the accuser does not have to make anything up because he has enough material to work with. How humiliating that must be for God!

And in that position, what do I crave? I desperately need grace and mercy. My life depends on it, really.

And what does God do? He gives me a job I love, a great family, a big backyard, and a car that hasn’t broken down for over three years.

Friday, the kids came into class quietly. They knew I was probably still frustrated about the previous day’s behavior, and I was. But I had also decided something. I wrote the morning directions on the blackboard and added at the bottom, “You will learn the most important lesson of the year today.”

After the morning had progressed a little, I asked the kids if they knew what the words "grace" or "mercy" meant. After a few guesses, the class realized they did not know the meanings of these two words—words they had heard and used themselves. I used the definitions I learned when I was a child. Grace is getting something you don’t deserve. Mercy is not getting what you do deserve. As an example of mercy, I told a story from my own class. Someone had stolen something of mine and I had caught her. She deserved a suspension, according to school policy. Yet, I did not suspend her. That was mercy.

I asked for an example of grace.

“If Meghan dumped out my desk and I didn’t tell on her,” a girl asked, "that would be grace?"

“If you didn’t tell on her,” I replied, “that would be mercy. If you cleaned it up and then tidied up Meghan’s desk, that would be grace.” I could see the idea was shocking. The kids looked around with their mouths open.

“But,” a boy said, “that wouldn’t be fair!”

“Grace is never fair,” I said. “That's the point. It’s about treating people better than they deserve to be treated. It’s something you need to practice because sometimes you are going to mess up and want someone to treat you better than you deserve.”

Bethany figured it out. “So if you gave us hot chocolate today, that would be grace.”

“Yes,” I said. “Yes, it would. And what if I gave you hot chocolate and candy bars?” I pulled out the hot chocolate packets and the candy bars. “Do you deserve these?”

The kids did not answer. They didn’t want to jeopardize any chances they had left.

“I am giving these to you today as a picture of grace,” I said. “Can you treat each other like this? If someone is mean to you, can you still be kind to him?”

“I don’t deserve hot chocolate,” said the boy who had spilled his cup while running in the room.

“No, you don’t,” I agreed, “but you’re getting some anyway.”