Average Joe: Hang on, Sloppy; there's hope for you yet
He was in the middle of unloading freshly cleaned drinking glasses from the dishwasher, having just placed some tumblers on a cupboard shelf. He was reaching up to shut that cabinet when his time on earth simply expired. His body gently slumped to the kitchen floor.
Average Joe was gone. Moments later, as his wife entered the room, the first thing she spied was the open cupboard door. She screamed when she saw it.
“EVERY. SINGLE. TIME. Why, why, why can’t you just close a cupboard door?”
Then, spotting the dishwasher door left wide open as well, she stamped a foot down.
“Oh, COME ON!”
Finally, she spotted his motionless feet attached to the rest of his lifeless self laid out on the floor. She sighed with the realization that he had been right all along in one of their perpetual debates: It actually would have killed him to close the cupboard door.
It was only the second time in their lives, by her count, that he had been right and she had been wrong. The first time was on K Street in Washington, D.C., in 1998 — all those years later, neither one could quite remember the gist of the debate that prompted her to concede an argument, but it was momentous enough an occasion that he insisted on taking a photograph on the spot to preserve the victory for posterity. And now, it was just too bad for him this time around — an empty victory because he was too dead to relish a little gloating.
He did not leave express written instructions for his headstone, so the task fell upon her to choose an appropriate epitaph.
The beautifully engraved, flowery script told onlookers all they really needed to know: “He never closed the cupboards.”
This entire scene was shown to me recently during a visit from the Ghost of Christmas Future, who must get pretty bored the rest of the year and thus acted on an impulse to go a-haunting on an August night.
I can still see that bony finger pointing at me, then pointing at the cupboard, then wagging at me. By golly, there’s still time for me to change!
“Ha!”
That’s the unmistakable sound of my wife reading this column. In fact, I bet she’s arranging to meet the Ghost of Christmas Future for girls’ night out. They are going to have margaritas and commiserate about the woeful state of the basement workshop, the garage, the backyard shed and my side of the bedroom. Then they are going to re-alphabetize the spice rack that I keep misarranging.
She knows who she married. And though she relentlessly cheers me on toward it, she might very well be terrified of a day when I do get my act together — for it may be a sure sign that it is instead she who has died and gone to heaven.
Look, every coupling is going to have one partner who excels a little more (OK, maybe even a lot more) than the other at the fine art of being kempt. Many of us who provide the disheveled end of that bargain really do want to be organized in our affairs, but we’re just so darn good at not being that person.
The dark deception of the Trapper Keeper
Oh, how I’ve longed to be neater in my ways. Anyone who has known me fairly well going all the way back to my Tasmanian devilish childhood has seen the path of destruction that I leave in my wake. As much as it stings, there's always more than a bit of truth when people called me Sloppy Joe.
I’d see TV commercials for the Trapper Keeper and I’d grow envious. Those kids were going places. There was not a shred of out-of-place-ness in their worlds. With those bright-colored binders and keen side-pocket folders and Velcro latches, there was no stopping them. Used properly, their Trapper Keepers were their tickets to Ivy League schools and a six-figure salary with a sports car and Malibu estate.
So, when I finally got a Trapper Keeper, it was a total disaster. It wasn’t long before I was drawing ink pen doodles on its clear plastic outer cover. Trails of spiral notebook paper chad spilled from its bulging sides. Nobody is sure whatever became of it, but it was last reportedly seen trying to hitchhike its way back to the Mead Corp. and telling anyone who would listen that a very awful boy was torturing it.
Where in the world are my wits?
I keep telling myself I’m a work in progress. But I seem to have somehow misplaced the progress; it might be under this stack of stuff I’ve got piled up over here.
The classic clichés of Messy Marvin and Pig-Pen were no accidents or contrived characters; we are real types who constitute an untold large percentage of the world’s population. Our shoelaces untie themselves with wild abandon. We drive away from the gas pump with our fuel doors still popped open. That was our coffee you saw strewn across the roadway near where we pulled away after setting it on the car’s roof for a second. We have paid out small fortunes toward overdue or lost library books. We are perfect storms of clumsiness and carelessness.
I marvel at my better half, and I give thanks every day for the ways that she saves the world from the ever-present threat of widely scatterbrained Joe. But we’ve got another issue — three teenagers and one tween in our house who take after me instead of her when it comes to keeping things in order. Her super-heroics are no match for our combined villainy. Something’s gotta give.
Mary Poppins to the rescue
The winds change and a familiar figure floats down from the sky, holding a smart umbrella aloft. She is the very vision of tidiness.
“Mary Poppins?”
“Yes, Joseph, but today I’m not playing that role. I’m filling in for The Ghost of Christmas Present. Ahem. COVID.”
“Why all these Dickens ghosts? It’s not even Christmas!”
“It is for you. Come along. I need to show you something.”
She takes me to the fireplace and produces a note, ostensibly written by my own boyish hand decades ago and then torn up and thrown in the hearth. I’m very suspicious. I did not even live in this house at that age, and my penmanship was never that nice. The note reads: “I NEED HER IN MY LIFE.”
“Joseph, do you remember how envious you were when you saw the movie and I swept in and magically cleaned up everything for Jane and Michael Banks?”
“Uh-huh …”
“And how you mimicked their moves and wrote a note to leave in the fireplace just like they did?”
“Nope. That was all a setup. You did that.”
“Fine. Anyway, the point is, nobody is ever going to do that for you — come in and snap their fingers and set everything as it should be in an instant. Oh, you are impetuous, Joseph. Incorrigible, even. But we mustn’t ignore reality. You simply must do these things for yourself.”
“I know, I know. It’s just so hard to change.”
“You must never give up. Spit spot. Now I must be moving along.”
“Wait a minute, Mary Poppins/Ghost of Christmas Present! Aren’t we at least going to sing a number together?”
“Oh heavens, no. I’ve heard your singing. It’s absolutely dreadful; a pack of rabid hyenas sounds better than you do. But please tell your wonderful wife to text me. I want in on that girls’ night out. I’ll bring the rum punch. Ta ta!”
And once again I’m snapping out of it, settling back into the reality of the messes I’ve got to clean up. The cupboards I need to remember to close. Just. Keep. Trying.
I glance up at the clouds. Did that visit really happen? Naw.
But if it did, that was so mean of her to diss my beautiful singing voice.
I should have told her to go fly a kite.
When he isn’t toiling away as the Beacon Journal metro editor, you can occasionally find Joe Thomas musing about everyday life as the Average Joe. Reach him at jthomas@thebeaconjournal.com
More Average Joe:Cranky father puzzlingly blames 'Dora the Explorer' for turning teen drivers into map haters
Still Another Average Joe: This goofball thinks that birds speak English and squirrels act out Billy Joel songs
Really quite enough Average Joe:Somebody please tell him that his kitchen appliances are not plotting to overthrow him? Et tu, toaster oven?
This article originally appeared on Akron Beacon Journal: Average Joe: There's hope in this world for the messiest among us
