I never got hurt doing dangerous things; I only got hurt being careful. In fact, there was only one thing that reliably got me into more trouble than being careful, and that was being extra careful.
This left me in an awkward position when I became a parent because I wanted my child to be safe, so I tried to teach him not to be too careful. I told him things like, “If you’re being too careful, then you shouldn’t be doing it,” and I heard Camrin’s mom tell him, “Don’t walk down the stairs with a sword in your pants.” This is why kids think their parents are crazy. And now that I have more children, I can tell you that it gets no easier.
And I can’t use my own upbringing as a guideline for what to tell my kids. My parents and I started out having conversations like this:
Mom/Dad: “You shouldn’t do dangerous things, right?”
Me: “Right! I’ll be careful.”
Mom/Dad [high-five]: “Woohoo!”
A couple of careful, hair-raising episodes later, and we had graduated to a deeper level of communication:
Dad: “You shouldn’t do dangerous things, right?”
Me: “Right!” (Not unless I’m being careful.)
Mom: “Not even if you’re being careful, right?”
Me: “Right!” (Unless I can think of a safe way to do it.)
Dad: “Not even if you think of a safe way, right?”
Me: “Right!” (Wow, they’re serious. I’m going to have to be extra careful.)
Mom: “He still has that look in his eyes.”
Me: “What look?”
Dad: “Stop thinking about a way to do it!”
Me: “I’m not. I’m thinking about being careful.” (Extra extra careful.)
Dad: “Oh well… maybe we’ll do better with the next child.” (They did not.)
As it turns out, what’s really dangerous is having conversations with parentheses.
From my point of view, these talks went along just fine, and there was no reason for my folks to be so worried. After all, we were in complete agreement, weren’t we? I wouldn’t even think about doing dangerous things. Everyone knew that doing dangerous things was stupid; I mean, I could get hurt. It was clear to me that I would only do things if I were being extra extra careful.
And what’s a parent to do? Sure, you can babyproof your house, but you can’t absolutely childproof it. And even if you could, you wouldn’t want to turn your home into a giant padded cell. Well, maybe you would want to, but eventually your kids are going to have to move out on their own, and they’re going to need to know how to use things like fire, electrical outlets, forks, and the occasional blowtorch. Besides, sooner or later, you’re going to get tired of living in a place where you’ve blocked off all of the hot water taps.
Fortunately, there’s a middle ground: your home can be a lath house, which is sort of like a garden shed, but large portions of the walls are screens of interwoven laths. A lath is nothing more than a long, skinny, flexible piece of wood. The idea is to create an enclosure where young plants can acclimate to the elements through some exposure to ventilation and sunlight, while still being protected from the full force of the weather. It’s a safe place where young things can grow strong enough to survive in the real garden.
And when I was a kid, we had a real lath house.
It was tucked away in the far corner of the backyard, and Jeff and I used it as a clubhouse with some of our friends. The part of the shed that wasn’t lath was driftwood-grey shiplap. The whole thing was about fifteen feet wide and eight feet deep, with an asphalt shingle roof sloping gently towards the back, where there was a four-foot gap between the back of the lath house and the fence behind it. That gap had a rock-and-weed floor, and was filled partway with old firewood and spiders.
Early one morning, Jeff and I took the doors off of the lath house.
“Why would you do that?” you might reasonably ask.
“Well,” I might answer evasively, “we needed them for something, that’s why.”
Later on, about lunch time, Dad wandered into the backyard to see what we were up to, which was always a smart, if often woefully belated, cautionary measure.
He was chatting with me rather earnestly about a hole that I was digging (that was deep enough to collapse and suffocate me) when he realized that there was something different about the lath house, at which point a whole pack of words got stuck trying to come out at once.
He was wrestling with a dilemma, you see.
His parental instinct was driving him to lecture us about how it was wrong for us to remove the doors, but he kept getting cut off in mid-launch by his desire to come up with a reason that would explain why it was wrong. He felt strongly that if something were wrong, then there should be a reason.
The choked fragments of sound suggested that he was thinking something along the lines of, “Taking the doors off of the lath house is clearly a bad thing to do, right? You just don’t do that, because… well, it could… or what if a big… oh hell… I guess that the boys can just put the doors back on with no harm done, right? Maybe it’s not such a big deal after all.”
“But then again, dammit, it sure seems like there should be something wrong with taking the doors off of the lath house. Even if there’s no real reason for it to be wrong, maybe it still counts as wrong if the boys simply think it’s wrong.”
“But if there’s no real reason for it to be wrong in the first place, then there’s no reason for the boys to think it’s wrong. Right?”
At least, that’s as much as I could figure out from the string of mildly strained exclamations that went, “Taking! Don’t do! Oh hell… but dammit… Right?”
His garbling came to a sudden halt as he happened to look up to see Jeff standing casually (some might even say insolently) on the roof of the lath house. Dad strode purposefully into battle as his brain eagerly latched onto the relative solidity of the flagrant roof-climbing violation. His dilemma evaporated because being up on the roof was undeniably wrong, with a clear reason: you could fall six or seven feet and land on a spider.
With your head.
Only, he no sooner got around the end of the lath house, ready to ask Jeff, “What are you doing up there?” (which is shorthand for “Get down from there!” plus “You’re in trouble!”) when he saw that Jeff was not, in fact, on the roof. Dad crunched to a halt, arms akimbo.
What he saw was Jeff walking from the roof to the neighboring fence, using the bridge that we had made with the doors.
Oh, the things that we did to Dad’s poor brain.
He appeared to be observing a brief interval of respectful silence.
In the moment, I thought that he was seeing that he had been unfair, and that we didn’t deserve a lecture. After all, we just wanted to get over to the roof from the fence. And why not? There’s nothing dangerous about just sitting on the roof, I mean, what can happen when you’re just sitting? And we already knew that sitting on the fence was safe. All we wanted to do was to get from the fence to the roof.
Safe plus safe equals safe. Simple.
The challenge was the 4-foot gap between the two. If we jumped, we might fall, and there was no reason to take that risk… not as long as we could figure out an easier way across. The safest thing to do would be to make a bridge. If we made it from scratch, then it would only be a rickety bunch of planks (which we didn’t have anyway), so it would clearly be better to take the doors off of the lath house for a while, and then put them back on again when we were done. They would be easy to get, and sturdy as well. What could be safer than walking across a strong bridge and sitting? Dad had obviously calmed down so quickly because he saw that we were being careful.
In retrospect, though, I can see that it wasn’t fair for us to get Dad all worked up about the doors, letting him get ready to lecture us about climbing on the roof, and then throw him a curve about this whole bridge thing. We were already grinding his gears ruthlessly between drive, reverse, and park, and then suddenly we took it into our heads to shift him into sideways. Our Wonkapapa.
But Dad vigorously shrugged off the whammy, regaining his sense of purpose, and I am happy to say that he seems to have suffered no permanent damage (other than chronic high blood pressure). Without actually yelling, he raised his voice up to where Jeff was now standing on the fence, and energetically accused, “Trace! … I mean Jeff! … I mean… You know who you are! Get down from there! What are you doing? … Someone’s going to get hurt!” And then almost as an afterthought, “Taking the doors off!?”
I was honestly confused. What was he upset about? The doors? But putting the doors back on would be super easy. Getting hurt? But we had gone to all this trouble just to avoid the dangerous alternative of leaping onto the roof. I really couldn’t figure out what the problem was supposed to be, so my mouth stepped in and volunteered, “What? You don’t want us to jump to the roof, do you?”
There was a momentary build-up, and then Dad burst out, “Fuschia!” (I think.) Whatever it was, it was funny, which didn’t help the situation.
So here we were, laughing, in trouble for being careful, even though we could think of no safer option.
But, as my dad later explained to us in punishing detail, there were a number of safer options that we had never even considered, such as not getting onto the fence or the roof in the first place. (I don’t know how anyone could reasonably expect us to think up a crazy scheme like staying off of the fence, but mine is not to question why… not during a lecture anyway… and certainly not out loud.) In fact, as Dad regained his equilibrium, he explained these options to us at length, and we found out that he had entertained an entirely different perspective on the whole situation.
He continued to explain this to us as we put the doors back on the lath house.
And as we were walking back inside.
And while we were sitting on the couch for the remainder of the afternoon.
And while we were eating dinner.
Until college.
Maybe if common sense were distributed in units other than “licks” I would have been more eager to get some as a kid. And believe me, as he was growing up I thanked the Spirit every day that my child had (and still has) more common sense in the hem of his garment than I have in my whole sock drawer. So I’m not too worried. Camrin has now made it over thirty years without terrifying incident and seems well on the way to doing just fine, although I admit that I’ll breathe more easily when they’re all three of them through their twenties. Okay, well, maybe their thirties (or so).
Frankly, that number just keeps getting higher.
I value this whole bridge episode particularly highly because I learned not one, but four crucial lessons.
Lesson 1: Kids don’t need to learn how to be careful, they need to learn how to be dangerous without getting permanently hurt.
Lesson 2: You don’t get credit for creative problem solving when you’re in trouble for creative problem creating.
Lesson 3: A destination is no safer than the paths that you take to get there.
Lesson 4: Inventing funny swear words in front of your kids can ruin a perfectly good mad.
And just in case you’re curious, “akimbo” is not a martial art, but comes from the Old Norse i keng boginn, meaning “bent into a crook.” I would have mentioned this earlier, but I figured that you wouldn’t want me to ruin the flow of the story.
You’re entirely welcome.