NFTV: Take the Garbage Out

It was a Saturday. I was working in Chicago. I only got home every couple of weeks. Dad and son were still in Massachusetts. This weekend I was home. I was ready to enjoy my family. This would not be an easy thing to do. My son was 17.

This particular Saturday. our precious 17 asked his father would he please, please, please drive to the next down over—it's only one town over—to get McDonald’s for a luncheon treat. Always a pushover for his only child, my husband took the mile long list for our still growing boy and set off on his journey to get the grub for his pioneer family.

As often happens on a busy Saturday at the drive through where teenagers work, our order ended up wrong. And wouldn’t you know it, my part was fine. So was my husband’s. It was a factor of numbers. The missing burger was our son’s.

The pout that appeared belonged on the face of one 3 times shorter. The attitude was one I had no time or patience for.

“I would like to have a pleasant lunch with my husband and my son. Could you get over this please?”

“What?”

“Could you at least pretend to have a little jubilance?”

He hovered over his happy meal like an ape who thought we’d steal it from him.

“Fine,” I said. “If you want to ruin your meal, go do it in your room. It’s not as if the universe conspired to get your order wrong.”

He left the kitchen with 17-year-old protestations, while his father reminded him that he needed to take the garbage out. He promised his father he would.

I was fine, except for the part of me that wanted to tell him to GROW UP. The rest of lunch was uneventful and life passed as it should that sunny, snowy February afternoon. Until one hour, two hours passed and the garbage hadn’t moved. It was starting to bother me. Besides cleaning his room, taking the garbage out was this child’s only real family chore. Take it out. Then once a week take the cans to the street, and later bring them back and put them under the porch. No dishes. His father prefered to do those himself.

I’m usually the laid-back one in the family, the Great Pacificator, the one who calms the others. But every now and then, I’m not. This was a now or a then, because I most certainly was not. I walked into the living room and told my husband please don’t interrupt me. I had to handle this thing. Then I went downstairs to my son’s room and quietly knocked on the door.

He invited me in. I asked if he could follow me please. I said I had something I’d like him to see. I asked him to please wait on the landing and I proceeded to get the garbage out of the can at the top of the stairs in the kitchen. I came back down to the back door. I opened it, and saw a stack of garbage cans one foot from where they belong under the porch—filled with a foot of snow. Two bags of garbage were on the ground next to them.

My son stood there watching with the practiced bored look of a 17-year-old.

Fury led me to measure my words, “This is . . . your mother . . . doing . . . your work.”

“And you’re doing it wrong.”

That is the point at which the snow and everything else in my vision turned red. The ticker tape behind my eyes went off the Richter scale.

“Go inside,” I said.

When I told my older, older brother I was never like that, he laughed and called it selective memory.

I keep hearing that old Frank Sinatra song, “When I was 17 it was a very good year. . .”

What was he thinking?

—me strauss Letting me be