Kids And Dirt

Chums (if any),

I’ve never been married, and as far as I know I’ve never fathered a child. So my point of view concerning kids, especially boys, can seem a little bit oddball to some adults. I guess it’s that I’ve never had to view kids from the standpoint of parenthood. It’s always been from the vantage point of the child.

Anyhow, when I was a kid I was a lot closer to being a Huckleberry Finn than I was a kid who wore starched white shirts and a little bow tie. I don’t think this disappointed my parents but I do think I was a little too similar to Huckleberry Finn for either of them to appreciate. My father in particular. He was constantly complaining to me about my ripping a shirt, or most often, simply being dirty. I remember one warm summer afternoon, when I was about twelve, my father took me and one of my pals to Sears. I think the trip was to buy a new toaster or something. Anyway, we happened to travel by the toy department. There right in front of us were a couple of shiny, new Schwinns. Just to get a feel for the bikes I perched myself on one and my friend perched himself on another. All the while my dad looked on impatiently. Later that evening, after dinner, my father stood in front of me and told me how embarrassed he had been because of my dirty legs. Both my buddy and I had worn shorts to the store and my dad was annoyed that my legs looked grimy while my friend’s legs were clean.

“While you and that other kid were sitting on those bikes,” my father huffed, “I couldn’t help but notice that his legs were clean and yours were a mess, and absolute dirty mess.“

My father making an issue of my unclean legs both hurt and irritated me. But the truth is, it didn’t really surprise me. A few weeks earlier my father complained to me that I had dirt under my fingernails. On that occasion the family had gone to a sitdown restaurant for dinner and apparently my fingernails weren’t as clean as they could be. “Look at those fingernails,” he moaned. “It looks like you’ve been digging in dirt all day.”

Well, I had been digging in dirt all day. A couple of fellow urchins and I had decided to dig a hole in someone’s backyard in search of old bones and arrowheads. Using our hands and an old shovel, we burrowed down about four feet before we gave up the subterranean exploration. I had washed my hands, but some of the mud still resided under my fingernails. Too much mud for my father to tolerate.

One summer our family took a vacation, driving from Ohio to Yellowstone. Along the way we meandered through the Badlands and the Black Hills of South Dakota. Whenever the car would stop and my sisters and I were allowed to scout about, we were instructed by my father not to get dirty. Keeping clean was easy when visiting a museum. It was not so easy when all of Badlands National Park stood in front of me at age eleven. In case you have never been to the Badlands, it’s really nothing but different natural formations made of dirt, formations that are begging to be climbed by a boy.

Last weekend I was visiting a friend. I glanced out a back window and there was his young son, along with other neighborhood boys, playing a backyard football game. Trousers were quickly surrendering to chronic grass stain. The guys were getting muddy fast. It looked like great fun. Then my friend glanced out the window and saw what his boy was doing. He quickly threw open the patio door and hollered, “I thought you kids were going to just toss the football around. I didn’t know you were going to take a mud bath.“

It was like I was hearing my dad all over again almost forty years later. “Hey, I’m not going to tell you how to raise your kid,” I blurted out, “but I wouldn’t dream of stopping kids from having fun simply because of a little dirt.”

Then I raised my hands and cautiously added, “But of course it’s none of my business. He’s your kid.”

My friend eyed me as his head began to nod. “Yeah, okay. I guess that’s why they make soap,” he rationalized.

“Yeah,” I responded, “and it’s also why they make childhood.”