The Weekly Screed (#650)

What’s wrong with kicking
the can down the road?
by David Benjamin

“We can do this. We can deal with this problem. We have time to deal with it.  But we need to deal with it now. No more kicking the can down the road, no more whistling past the grave yard…”
                                                                         — Speaker of the House John Boehner

MADISON, Wis. — All through the recent phony fiscal crisis fomented by House Republicans, the Republicans’ favorite metaphor was “kicking the can down the road” — a rustic pleasure about which they uttered not a single kind word.

Well, have they ever gone outside, found a nice empty, dented Blatz can and actually done it? Kicked that sucker down the road? I doubt it.

It’s bad enough that our most pious political leaders have come out against Christian gestures like feeding the hungry, succoring the sick and suffering the children to come unto pre-kindergarten education. But can-kicking?
What’s wrong with thumping away at a tin can, or a rock, or beat-up old half-deflated red kickball on your way home from a hard day of non-unionized charter school matriculation, outperforming your public-school peers?

Having attended a parochial school from 2nd through 7th grade, where I outperformed the “publics” in the school across the street to an almost pathological extreme (I hit 11th-grade reading level by 5th grade!), I needed my daily dose of can-kicking just to relieve the academic pressure, find my karma and unwind.

Not that this habit didn’t have a few untoward consequences. One dark January afternoon, with Tomah’s abundance of discarded cans locked beneath four feet of hard snow, I resorted to a cantaloupe-size chunk of ice. I bounced it absentmindedly off snowbanks as I moseyed down Elm Street from St. Mary’s School, up Cady Avenue and over to Pearl, mentally reviewing my catechism lessons and dreading an upcoming oral report on Eritrea. Pausing once and looking down, I saw — with shock and horror — that repeated collisions with a jagged ice-block harder than granite had torn a huge hole across the toe of my right boot.

I should note that in my Great White North grade-school days, rubber golashes were a significant fashion item. The most glamorous golashes had a vertical row of metal buckles, which — if you left them unfastened — would jangle and clink as you walked, which was the cool thing to do. Less cool was to clip your buckles together and plod — silent and dry-footed — through the ice and snow. Totally uncool were golashes with zippers. By prevailing on Mom, I had dodged the ignominy of appearing in public in zippered boots. But I made my own non-conformist choice to endure hoots, jeers and ridicule on the issue of buckling or not buckling. I hated getting snow in my boots and then sitting all day in school inhaling the miasma of wet socks — especially since, like most boys in that era, I tended to change socks, at most, once a week.

I gazed down aghast at the gash in my golash.

A kid didn’t get new golashes every winter, or even every other winter. Boots were expected to last. I didn’t know how much they cost, but I knew they were the sort of expense that turned parents anxious, despondent and slightly dangerous. I knew that just the words “I need new boots” would send Mom into a week-long funk of sitting in the dark, smoking and brooding. I might as well say “brand-new Cadillac convertible” or “open-heart surgery.”

The death of my golashes was worse in my case because I was a chronic knee-ripper. I couldn’t keep my pants intact. No sooner did I get a pair of jeans, corduroys or black-twill trousers from Penney’s than somehow, I would find myself flung knees-foremost to the asphalt playground at St. Mary’s, sundering my new pants symmetrically. My constantly ragged trousers lent me the aspect of a street urchin in a Pat O’Brien movie. Decades later, ironically, ripped jeans became trendy. But in my days at St. Mary’s, where Jesus reserved his love to the neatly pressed and well-groomed, torn pants were a form of venial sin and a sign that you probably lived in a trailer and your old man couldn’t hold down a job.

Most of the time, Mom couldn’t afford to replace my ripped pants. One solution was heat-transfer knee patches — which “ironed on” magically several hours before, inevitably, they “peeled off” like wet Band-Aids from a scraped knuckle. It was the repeated, embarrassing falling-off of iron-on patches that drove me, by and by, to learn how to sew. Even today, after 25 years of marriage, my wife marvels at my skill with a needle and thread — not because I do it well but because (like a dog walking on its hind legs) I can do it at all.

No one taught me, of course. I learned the rudiments surreptitiously, watching my grandmother, Annie. She rarely passed an evening without sewing something up, while keeping an eye on the TV and occasionally telling my grandfather — whom we called Papa — as he dozed through “Have Gun, Will Travel” or “Father Knows Best,” to “wake up, goddammit, and go to bed.”

My favorite sewing trick was watching Annie darn a sock. She would stretch it over a dead lightbulb and then cross-hatch patiently, serenely, thread-by-thread — usually in a color completely dissonant with the original sock — until the hole became the strongest (and prettiest) part of the sock. Nobody darns anymore. Although I could do it (crudely), because I learned from Annie, I never darn. I just throw ‘em away and buy new socks. But there is something beautiful in a well-darned sock — a work of art that would equally captivate, I think, both Picasso and Norman Rockwell. Sometimes I wish I’d saved one of those Annie-darned socks, to contribute to a museum, somewhere, of lost American folk arts…

…where they would also have classes, for kids, on how to walk home from school — three miles, uphill — kicking a can all the way.