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Jake
carefully folded the morning newspaper, neatly feeding the
sections back into each other, recreating its original compact
state for the next reader. His little sister, Janar, was home
from college. She was attempting to sweep the kitchen floor.
Her approach was pathetic; zigzagging all over the place.
Probably, no one had ever shown her the efficient and
effective sweeping techniques his drill sergeant had shown him
in basic. If she was going to do the job, she should know how
to do it right.
“Janar! Hand me that broom.”
Startled out of her reverie, her
face blank with the sudden assault, Janar handed Jake the
broom upon command before she fully processed what was about
to happen. Trying to recover from the abrupt invasion of her
private thoughts, she noticed that Jake was still talking.
She knew that he would be upset if she couldn’t repeat back to
him what he had said. He would often ask her to do that to
see if she was listening. She stood very still, focused on
his lips moving, and struggled to tune in to his voice.
“Once you have swept the baseboard
crevices, using the broom on an angle, you go back over the
that area and sweep about two inches out to collect the dirt
you have pulled out from the crevice. See there! That dog
hair—it’s just about two inches from the baseboard now.” His
eyes jumped from the dog hair, making fierce contact with
hers, as he blurted: “Janar, did you hear me? What did I
say?” She repeated his last sentence back to him: “The dog
hair is two inches from the baseboard.” He released her eyes;
he was satisfied.
She had learned this trick for
occasions such as these. Most of the time it worked and Jake
believed she had absorbed what he said simply because she
could repeat it. Repeating his words was easy for her and got
her through these confrontations with minimal conflict while
most of her mind remained internally focused.
Jake was still instructing, “You
have to be alert when you’re doing this job; you have to
remember where you have swept. You go in a straight pattern,
moving all the dirt into one pile, like this. You have to
have a system.”
She and Jake were like night and
day—but even night and day come together briefly at sunrise
and twilight. Perhaps this was one of those magical times
when Jake might really see and hear her. Janar risked it:
“Why?”
“Why, what?”
“Why do you HAVE to have a
system?”
“So you can accomplish the job
efficiently!”
He bent forward, sticking his face
into her personal space. His incredulous tone implied that
everybody knows that and she was somehow behind in her
understanding. He continued his lesson, sounding a bit more
impatient than he had when he started, “There’s a system to
everything, an effective way to accomplish any job with the
least amount of energy. The goal is to discover this method
and use it.”
“What if doing the job efficiently
takes away the joy of doing it?”
“You are sweeping the floor! It’s
a job that has to be done; the idea is to do it quickly and
effectively. Once it is successfully accomplished, you can
move on to other things.”
“That’s exactly it; since I have
to do it, I’d rather enjoy doing it!”
“Your method was not effective. I
was watching.”
“It was effective in providing me
enjoyment and sweeping up the dirt just fine. I liked what I
was doing. If my broom had had paint on it, I would have the
most beautiful abstract painting right now. I could kind of
see it as…”
“The goal is to get the dirt swept
up. Then you can go paint. That’s what I was trying to tell
you before. Now, once you’ve collected the dirt from the
baseboard crevices, you move to a grid pattern for the rest of
the floor.”
Janar gazed down, recreating the
abstract as she left it, a dazzling, red lightening bolt,
cutting across the kitchen floor. Jake’s angular swish across
the baseboard was a dark gray-blue, the sky preparing to
release. The dirt and dog hair he had swept looked like an
elm leaf. She could see how the crusty masterpiece had
coasted on the gentle currents down to its destiny, to its
home on the forest floor. She smiled inside herself. This
was the calm before the storm. All life settling into place,
creating the semblance of order. The sense of peace moments
before Nature’s revolt.
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