The Adventures of a Modern Day Tom Sawyer
One of my favorite scenes in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is when Tom, tasked with whitewashing the picket fence as punishment, gets friends and passersby begging – heck, paying! – him to let them all have a turn at painting.
I always thought this was so clever and ingenious of Tom, and such a great way to flaunt authority. Pure Mark Twain!
I found myself an unwitting Tom Sawyer one fall about ten years ago as I started to plant bulbs for spring in front of our quarters at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. I am not a gardener, and why exactly I was planting these bulbs is beyond me. Maybe they were free from the Self Help Center, and I was trying to be a Martha Stewart good citizen. Or maybe my Martha Stewart good citizen neighbor talked me into doing it one evening after a glass of wine. Who knows!
At any rate, there I was digging holes in front of the house, when all of a sudden I found myself surrounded by a throng of inquisitive, sweaty toddlers and pre-schoolers. They wanted to know what I was doing. More than that, they all wanted to “help.” So, finally, probably having other things to attend to, like laundry or dinner, I told the lot of them to have at it! But to take turns.
I mean, how much damage could a bunch of rugrats do with a gardening trowel?
It wasn’t really all that much later, however, when my neighbor, the same Martha Stewarty one, knocked on my screen door.
“Hey! What are ya doing out here? Burying a body?!?”
I figured she was exaggerating, but when I went out onto the front porch, I found that the children had managed to dig a rather deep hole. I mean, you could have planted the Great Big Enormous Turnip in there, you know, the one that took the grandfather, the grandmother, the granddaughter, the dog, the cat, and the mouse to pull the durned thing up out of the ground. It was hysterical.
It made me think that maybe I had power afterall….
More recently, I found myself intentionally playing the role of Tom Sawyer. I got this brilliant idea to have my two teenaged sons paint our garage. I can’t remember the last time it was painted, and it was beginning to peel rather badly. Surely, I could convince my sons of the wisdom and joy of painting a garage as a way to earn money over Summer break.
I think my Tom Sawyer persuasiveness skills were more influential on me, however, than they were on the boys. Sure, they were interested in doing the job, but I found myself wanting to take part, wanting to help scrape and paint. I had never really painted anything big before, and the allure of creative manual labor was starting to take hold….
The day after school let out for the summer, I took my younger son (the only one awake before noon) down to the local Ace Hardware Store. We had a really fun time picking out brushes and scrapers and figuring out what color and kind of paint to get. My son helped me select the right shade of gray, and then we watched, mesmerized, as the hardware paint department guy used a computer to add the right mix of paints to a gallon of pure white paint. He then put the gallon in a machine that rotated and moved and mixed the paint all together. It was really cool! Even my teenager was enthralled. “Mom, this is really cool!” he whispered.
We could hardly wait to get home and start scraping and painting.
The guy at the store told us that first we had to scrape. Then we had to apply the primer coat. He mixed up a batch of that, so it was closer in shade to the final gray than its natural white. And then we had to paint over the primer layer with a coat of the regular latex exterior and trim.
I say “we” as in the royal we.
This job was meant for the boys. A lesson in hard work and manual labor and job satisfaction. They would get paid, of course, don’t worry. But I wanted them to learn about doing a job right and the satisfaction of a job well done.
The only thing was… I wanted to lend a hand at scraping and painting. And being in charge. And telling them what to do. And how to do it. And so on. And so on.
Only that is not what I wanted at all. I wanted THEM to do all the work.
So, last Friday I went off to work and announced: “Well, I left my two teenaged boys at home with two gallons of paint”
I knew they would do a lot better if left to themselves. With no one to nag or direct or needle or point out missed spots, et cetera.
And they did.
At about one o’clock in the afternoon, my younger son called me at work to tell me they had finished painting the first wall of the garage.
“It looks AW---”
[Oh, my God! I thought to myself. It looks AWFUL!]
“It looks AWESOME!!!”
Right. Yes. Awesome.
“Great!” I said.
My son was so excited with the work they had just done, he was calling me to tell me how incredibly awesome it looked. This was great! Wonderful! Just what I was looking for actually.
But then why did I feel so left out…?
Jealous or envious even?
Here, they were getting to have all the fun. Scraping and painting and painting some more. Sure, it was a long, involved process. But they certainly seemed up to it. And were having a ball!
Seemed like Tom Sawyer was being successful in her endeavors afterall….
“A modern-day warrior
Mean, mean stride,
Today’s tom sawyer
Mean, mean pride.”
I always thought this was so clever and ingenious of Tom, and such a great way to flaunt authority. Pure Mark Twain!
I found myself an unwitting Tom Sawyer one fall about ten years ago as I started to plant bulbs for spring in front of our quarters at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. I am not a gardener, and why exactly I was planting these bulbs is beyond me. Maybe they were free from the Self Help Center, and I was trying to be a Martha Stewart good citizen. Or maybe my Martha Stewart good citizen neighbor talked me into doing it one evening after a glass of wine. Who knows!
At any rate, there I was digging holes in front of the house, when all of a sudden I found myself surrounded by a throng of inquisitive, sweaty toddlers and pre-schoolers. They wanted to know what I was doing. More than that, they all wanted to “help.” So, finally, probably having other things to attend to, like laundry or dinner, I told the lot of them to have at it! But to take turns.
I mean, how much damage could a bunch of rugrats do with a gardening trowel?
It wasn’t really all that much later, however, when my neighbor, the same Martha Stewarty one, knocked on my screen door.
“Hey! What are ya doing out here? Burying a body?!?”
I figured she was exaggerating, but when I went out onto the front porch, I found that the children had managed to dig a rather deep hole. I mean, you could have planted the Great Big Enormous Turnip in there, you know, the one that took the grandfather, the grandmother, the granddaughter, the dog, the cat, and the mouse to pull the durned thing up out of the ground. It was hysterical.
It made me think that maybe I had power afterall….
More recently, I found myself intentionally playing the role of Tom Sawyer. I got this brilliant idea to have my two teenaged sons paint our garage. I can’t remember the last time it was painted, and it was beginning to peel rather badly. Surely, I could convince my sons of the wisdom and joy of painting a garage as a way to earn money over Summer break.
I think my Tom Sawyer persuasiveness skills were more influential on me, however, than they were on the boys. Sure, they were interested in doing the job, but I found myself wanting to take part, wanting to help scrape and paint. I had never really painted anything big before, and the allure of creative manual labor was starting to take hold….
The day after school let out for the summer, I took my younger son (the only one awake before noon) down to the local Ace Hardware Store. We had a really fun time picking out brushes and scrapers and figuring out what color and kind of paint to get. My son helped me select the right shade of gray, and then we watched, mesmerized, as the hardware paint department guy used a computer to add the right mix of paints to a gallon of pure white paint. He then put the gallon in a machine that rotated and moved and mixed the paint all together. It was really cool! Even my teenager was enthralled. “Mom, this is really cool!” he whispered.
We could hardly wait to get home and start scraping and painting.
The guy at the store told us that first we had to scrape. Then we had to apply the primer coat. He mixed up a batch of that, so it was closer in shade to the final gray than its natural white. And then we had to paint over the primer layer with a coat of the regular latex exterior and trim.
I say “we” as in the royal we.
This job was meant for the boys. A lesson in hard work and manual labor and job satisfaction. They would get paid, of course, don’t worry. But I wanted them to learn about doing a job right and the satisfaction of a job well done.
The only thing was… I wanted to lend a hand at scraping and painting. And being in charge. And telling them what to do. And how to do it. And so on. And so on.
Only that is not what I wanted at all. I wanted THEM to do all the work.
So, last Friday I went off to work and announced: “Well, I left my two teenaged boys at home with two gallons of paint”
I knew they would do a lot better if left to themselves. With no one to nag or direct or needle or point out missed spots, et cetera.
And they did.
At about one o’clock in the afternoon, my younger son called me at work to tell me they had finished painting the first wall of the garage.
“It looks AW---”
[Oh, my God! I thought to myself. It looks AWFUL!]
“It looks AWESOME!!!”
Right. Yes. Awesome.
“Great!” I said.
My son was so excited with the work they had just done, he was calling me to tell me how incredibly awesome it looked. This was great! Wonderful! Just what I was looking for actually.
But then why did I feel so left out…?
Jealous or envious even?
Here, they were getting to have all the fun. Scraping and painting and painting some more. Sure, it was a long, involved process. But they certainly seemed up to it. And were having a ball!
Seemed like Tom Sawyer was being successful in her endeavors afterall….
“A modern-day warrior
Mean, mean stride,
Today’s tom sawyer
Mean, mean pride.”
posted by delta at 11:07 PM
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