God has seen fit to bless me with two children. I
have a 26 year old daughter and a 24 year old son. They share the same set of
parents…and very little else. In many ways the two of them are polar opposites,
God’s peculiar brand of humor, as if to say, “Watch what amazingly unique
people I can create from such unremarkable ingredients!” In perhaps no corner of life are the two of
them any more wildly different than in the area of organization. Kaitlin is “the
cloud” to Patrick’s overstuffed filing cabinet. For example…
A couple of years ago, Pam and I drove down to
Nashville to help Patrick pack up all of his worldly belongings into a U-Haul
truck from Belmont University to Westminster Choir College in Princeton, New
Jersey. He assured us in the week leading up to the big day that he had been
getting everything ready so moving day would be “no big deal.” What we found
upon our arrival still gives me nightmares to this day. There was Patrick,
standing amongst the most unruly collection of boxes, bags and plastic bins
imaginable. In one particularly frightening box there was a large frying pan
with a sliver of dried food still attached, an unfolded tuxedo vest, two boxes
of tea, a spatula and a handful of sheet music, the very definition of “miscellaneous.”
Contrast this with our experience two weeks ago when
we made the same trip to move Kaitlin home after two years of grad school in
Winston-Salem, North Carolina. We walked in to her bedroom and there were boxes
taped up and labeled with permanent marker, “Coffee Mugs”, “Non-perishable
kitchen supplies.” A hearty group of able bodied and similarly focused friends
had been recruited for the task of packing the U-haul, among them an engineer
with an amazing gift for geometry who made packing the truck a breeze. Once
home it took three rooms upstairs to contain all of Kaitlin’s stuff, but within
the week she had single handedly gone through it all, designating this pile for
Goodwill, that for the dump. Imagining Patrick navigating a similar challenge
is practically unthinkable. He simply lacks the linear thinking skills necessary
to organize and execute such a thing. He would open a box to empty it only to
be distracted by a notation on some random piece of sheet music found inside,
then run to his keyboard to get to the bottom of it. Two hours later, the next
item in the box would be discovered.
So, you can imagine the level of guilt that my wife
had that we were not able to be in New Jersey yesterday for Patrick’s move from
first year apartment to second year rental home. There was a U-haul involved,
and the dismantling and reassembly of desks and beds, and she wasn’t there to
help him plow through it all. So imagine our shock when he sends us a picture
of his room last night at 10:30. There was his corner desk with his $5000 worth
of musical technology up and running. There was his bed in the foreground…MADE.
There was a picture hung on the wall, and white Christmas lights strung along
the ceiling. We could actually see the floor! He had done it, he had successfully
moved and organized his new home without his mother’s guiding hand. Although I
have my suspicions about just how much of this he did without some sort of assistance,
probably from at least one female friend, still, it was a very impressive
picture, more proof that he is closer than ever to becoming an actual grownup.
Amazing.
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