I heard an unusual sound emanating from my 16-year-old son's room and went to investigate. The door was shut. I silently debated: knock and interrupt or wait until it was over? First I hovered but then I thought, "What if he opens the door and finds me here listening?" Finally I went away, hoping he would want to talk about it afterward.
Later I screwed up the courage to ask: "Before, in your room, I thought I heard something."
"I was vacuuming," he said.
"Vacuuming," I said. "On a school night. With the door shut."
He shrugged. "The floor was messy."
I said nothing.
"It was distracting me," he said.
Distracting: that's when it struck me. Why on this night above all other nights would a 16-year-old boy who had never before been spontaneously seized by the urge to vacuum suddenly suffer such a compulsion? "Tell me the truth," I said. "Do you by any chance have a major writing assignment due tomorrow that you have not yet started?"
His guilty look told all.
He's one of us, I thought: he belongs to the tribe of those who must write but can't write without the proper preparatory rituals, the pencil-sharpening or dish-washing or room-straightening or even checkbook-balancing, who must dust the computer desk before touching the keyboard and then, while the dustrag is handy, decide not to stop with the computer desk but move on to the piano and the coffee table and the dusty bookcase where, come to think of it, the books need to be put back into alphabetical order before another minute passes. He's long and lean and looks nothing like me but here I see proof of my contribution to his genetic makeup: he cannot begin to write an essay for English class without first vacuuming his room to eliminate distractions.
I heaved a sigh of relief. "So what are you writing about?"
"Just an essay. On The Scarlet Letter. You know, sunlight and shadow and stuff."
"The scene in the woods," I said. "You could write about that, and---"
But he put his hand on my shoulder and stopped me. "I can do this myself," he said.
And you know, I think he can.
1 comment:
You know, there is another name for that: procrastination.
I realized this myself when I was in the process of writing my dissertation. I came upon a writer's block and decided that it must be because my sink was not gleaming white, and had a few stain marks on it. I was halfway through scrubbing before it hit me. I was procrastinating, putting off writing my dissertatation, and if I didn't get back to it I would never finish it.Eventually this line of thinking led me to a depraved life under the Westover Bridge.
I threw the sponge down in the sink, washed the Comet off my hands (but left it on the sink), and finished the section of my dissertation. Then I went back to the sink scrubbing. Somehow it wasn't as necessary to remove every tan patch then.
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