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| Miriam Stone |
“Paved with good intentions.” But, what is paved with good intentions? Why can’t I remember the rest of the saying, she thought.
Jane shifted from one foot to the other and then back again, trying to restore circulation to her legs. Still she pondered the question, “What is paved with good intentions?” It came to her in a flash – the road to hell. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
What an appropriate saying, how perfect, thought Jane, especially given where I am right now. What am I doing in this impossible line of people?
Every year on the day before school began for her three children, Jane could be found at her local WalMart, slowly inching her way to the checkout, her cart loaded with the school supplies that her three kids had to have in order to become the smartest kids in their class. Since Jane was so far from the check-out counter that she would need binoculars just to see what number line, she let her mind wander.
Every summer, parents who wanted the best for their children, or those who just wanted all the other parents to feel like crap when comparing their parenting skills to the skills of their fellow parents, ran out and signed their kids up for arts and crafts, summer camp, local playground programs, museum visits and a lavish family vacation – one preferably not in the country in which they were currently living – because as every parent knows, the measure of a child’s success, intellectually and culturally, all depends on how many stamps his passport can support.
Inside Jane’s head she could hear laughing and she wondered what it was that she was finding so amusing. She thought about their last vacation (abroad, of course). She and her husband had such hope that they would come home with children who would have to find a new group to play with because they had totally outgrown the run-of-the mill playgroup that anyone could join.
Her children had been to the top of the Eifel Tower, and yet whenever they talked about their trip to France, the only memory of the time they spent there was when they ate snails. The summer before that had also not produced the results Jane and her husband hoped for. They stayed in the United States and went all the way to Mount Rushmore. But, when school started that year and the teacher asked how they spent their summer vacation, Robbie, the third grader kept saying that Mount Rushmore was the best “natural” phenomenon that he had ever seen. Nope, thought Jane, no new playgroup for Robbie.
The absolute worst summer they had was when Jane decided to buy the children cameras in order for each child to take pictures of the most important things they had seen while away. Robbie managed to take a not so bad picture of his family, but when Jane got all of the pictures developed, having planned a great cultural experience with her family around the kitchen table, she found out just exactly what her children did value. Robbie valued every pile of dirt he came across and took copious pictures of every single one of them. The middle child took a disturbing number of pictures of the youngest child’s butt. Jane thought that the baby’s butt did look better than her face, considering the fact that upon their touchdown, the baby began screaming and she screamed her way through the midwest. “Maybe,” thought Jane, “the middle child was only trying to convey that the baby was a “pain in the butt” and she comforted herself with that, having decided that her middle child was a genius and worthy of an upgrade in playgroup status.
The children were so precious, thought Jane. She would have liked them better had they stayed home with Dad, but Dad had a case of the flu and couldn’t take care of them. Jane was sure that her husband’s flu-like symptoms would improve and he would feel tremendously better as soon as he heard the sound of the car fade away in the distance. So, here she was, in line at Walmart, listening to her two oldest children fight about who got what color pencils. The baby, who wouldn’t need pencils for quite a while, suddenly let out a shrill screech and kept on letting it out, much to Jane’s dismay and the dismay of any other shopper near them. Jane could see hearing aids being turned off and while she was apologizing to shoppers for whatever level of stress they felt that they were enduring, she was busy hating her husband.
Why is it, Jane pondered, that husbands get to take conference calls from highly placed, not to mention disgustingly rich, people while wives get to help color in the coloring book. And when a husband is sick and down for the count, he gets to eat toast and sip tea and stay warm in bed while his wife plays servant to his needs. Jane also thought that it was a strange coincidence that when she got sick and she was fading fast, her husband was always away from home, meeting with the important conference callers. Just as she was finding the one place in her bed that would allow her to ride out her sickness, the middle child would always burst into her bedroom reminding her that she had volunteered to go on the very next class trip – and guess what? It’s today! Jane’s hatred of her husband had always ratcheted up during these “precious” moments with her children.
There is one skill that every mother possesses. No matter how loud her children get, she can get louder. She told the two older children that whatever they had now in their cart was what they would be getting tonight; and if they insisted that the color of the pencil was vital to every facet of their development, she would come tomorrow by herself and get them exactly the color they wanted. “So, just ‘SHUT UP!’” And they did. Even the baby forgot how unhappy she was and quieted because watching your mother implode in front of a hundred people in the checkout line at WalMart - well that’s entertainment!
As Jane got hold of her emotions and was in the process of apologizing to every stranger she looked at, she noticed that a very old woman was standing behind her in line. “it’s the pencils,” the old lady said. “The pencils remind me of when I was as young as your children are now.” For a moment a look of serenity came over her face, because one of the truism’s of life is that the farther away one gets from an experience, the more pleasure you get from the remembrance of it..
Her face cleared and she said, “every year when we started school we were given a pencil – one pencil. We guarded our pencils as if they were gold, and indeed they were gold to us. There was no television when I was young, certainly no computers. Our parents saved for a whole year just so we could buy a radio. We didn’t have cars so we walked wherever we went. No one was in a hurry back them because there was really no place to go. Life was slow and we had ‘forever’ in our minds.
For us, the world was indeed a world away. It was a place we could only go to in our imagination for our own worlds were very small. Maybe you can see why we guarded our pencils. They were the only way that we had to express our joy and our sorrow. They were the only way we could record our lives and give to you the history that you study now in school.”
She continued, “ In the winter, the school sent a sleigh around to each house every day. Our mother’s heated bricks in the oven and put them around us to keep us warm. We went on the road, but not like the roads today. Our sleigh would make a path on the ground. Trees, weighted with snow, leaned out over our sleigh. And it was quiet – so peaceful and quiet, We made no sound as we sliced through the snow in that sleigh.”
“Oh my,” the old woman said. “That was so long ago. My children’s children go to school now. Every Sunday my son picks me up and takes me to his home for Sunday dinner. The very first thing that I do there is I walk around the house picking up discarded pencils – the ones that are no longer the right color, or the right size.”
The old woman smiled. “My grandchildren laugh at me, but I don’t care because when I get home and put my new found pencils with the rest of my pencil collection and I look at it I know that I am a rich woman. I wonder what it is that you will value when your children’s children are in school. What will make you feel as if you are rich?”
“I talk too much”, she mused. “I know. Thank you for listening. I think I talk so much because there is no more “forever” for me and I still have so much I want to say. Young people think they know all the answers, but in reality, they know very little. Old people know most of the answers because we have experienced many things in our long lives. I think that the curse of being old is that we have answers, but no one ever asks us any questions.” She sighed and quietly said, ”It’s the pencils. My, that takes me back.”
The three children watched her and waited for her to stop talking. When she had finished, the two older children went back to arguing the merits of colored pencils. It was turning into one of those kinds of fights – the one where the mother of the fighters pretends that she doesn’t know them. The baby, thankfully, was quiet.
Jane couldn’t see clearly because her eyes were awash with the tears that were now rolling down her face. She promised herself that she was going to call her mother this weekend.
But, life goes on. It was now Jane’s turn with the checkout lady. The baby began crying again and Jane began searching frantically through her purse looking for her credit card so she could pay for their purchases.
The brief moment of clarity that she had felt a moment ago, quietly slipped away.
June, 2014
