During a recent baseball tournament, one of my jobs was prepping diamonds between games. Depending on time, that might mean a quick raking around home and the bases and redoing the batter’s boxes and foul lines with chalk. Other times, I could do a full reset, where I’d completely drag the field and redo everything.
I’d get done, gaze upon the perfection that is a newly-prepared field, and then watch it get destroyed within one inning. Darn those kids!
Isn’t it strange how much effort we put into making things look pristine, knowing full well that it won’t last? How often do you dust at home? How long until you notice dust again? And try having a shedding pet like our cat - good luck keeping the fur, along with all the litter, from inundating your house!
We once, foolishly, let a vacuum cleaner salesman in our house. We had an ulterior motive since we had young children who tended to spill and stain the carpet. He had promised a free cleaning of one room, and we almost rubbed our hands together in glee, thinking our problem was, at least temporarily, solved.
During the hour-long spiel, he asked, “Don’t you want your carpet perfectly clean?” I responded in the negative, saying a little dirt was okay. I still believe that since it’s important to be exposed to germs and build immunity to diseases. You certainly don’t want to hear the grit as you tread on your carpet, but vacuuming every other day seems excessive.
I don’t think he’d ever heard that respnse since he was, at last, speechless for a moment. And when you have young children, you really just try to keep up. You’re looking for a C grade on cleanliness since it’s just going to get messed up again. You might try for an A grade when the grandparents are coming over, but I always thought it made more sense to do a thorough cleaning AFTER the party. But we always default to how it appears to others.
When we moved into our home, our neighbors promptly showed up where the property lines were, and one offered us the use of their mower since the grass was getting a little long. It didn’t take long to figure out that keeping our lawn mowed was expected. And it didn’t take long for me to buy in.
When I was growing up, living in the country, a freshly-mowed lawn wasn’t as big a deal since you didn’t really have neighbors. But in town, it shows if somebody is a week behind. And life happens at times, not allowing you to get it done quite as often, but I usually look at my lawn a couple days after I’ve mowed and think, “I might have to mow again soon.” There’s that darned perfection, ruined again.
The same goes outdoors with landscaping. I try to keep up with weeding and keeping that area clean. And then I’ll walk by something with some huge weed that there was no way it grew since I walked by here two days ago, at least not to the six-inch height it’s currently at. Good luck keeping the landscaping perfect; weeds tend to win, at least temporarily.
Working at a grocery store in high school and college, I would often have to build displays of products that were on sale. There was pride in putting together a perfectly symmetrical display on the end cap or on the sale wall. And then I’d walk by five minutes later and it was undone by those darned customers who wanted to buy the sale item. I still recall a soda display that I kept refilling for my entire eight-hour shift, just trying to keep up with the pop in the shape I had created originally. I failed.
We try so hard to be perfect at times. We’ll almost always fail. There have only been 24 perfect games in MLB history, times in which the pitcher has not allowed a single baserunner in all nine innings of a professional game. There have been almost 239,000 games played to reach that number in 154 years.
Setting realistic goals is important. I was on a committee at school some years back while forming strategic goals. The presenter said we should never use 100% as a goal since it’s nearly always unachievable. For example, schools want to shoot for 100% of all students graduating. It’s a laudable goal; that’s what we’re there for, to help kids succeed and be ready to move into the real world. But it rarely, if ever, happens. There are circumstances outside the school’s control that keep that number from being reached. Yet, you’ll still see that perfection as a goal.
In 28 years of teaching, I have had five “perfect” speeches. The students who achieved this didn’t make mistakes, didn’t stutter, didn’t sway around or play with their hair, looked up 90% of the time, and spoke with emotion, not just like robots. This has become a coveted accomplishment since Mr. Domeier is known as a harsh grader on public speaking. And for three of the people honored on my bulletin board, they gave speeches after their perfect ones and couldn’t replicate it.
We need to accept reality in so many areas. It’s important to work hard, even if we know it won’t last. My ballfields will always get wrecked, but the perfection right before gametime is worth it!
Word of the Week: This week’s word is ept, which means competant or skillful, as in, “No matter how ept the student was in English, they never quite reached the 100% plateau.” Impress your friends and confuse your enemies!