White Punks On Dope

Sign on a phone pole near my house:

garage / moving sale
Saturday, July 1
[address]
10:00 - 2: 00
everything must go
furniture
garden tools
clothes
we want to take nothing with us

If there were a phone number I'd call. I want to know where they were going and what they expected to find. Clothes? What are they wearing now? The answers are probably more interesting than the questions. John turns the cubicle corner with smile on his face and a very old book in his hand. He is King of Preservation. If he's holding it it's turning to dust.

John: I think this book is for you.
Tata: What is it? I must know!
John: How Shall We Train Our Wives And Children? by F. Hopkinson Smith.
Tata: Oh, Jesus Christ, what is that? It seems small. Is that a whole monograph?
John: I don't know. I think you should read it and give a report to the whole class.
Tata: Okay, but there better not be a quiz!

Mr. Smith gave a speech at "the 13th subscription dinner of the Hamilton Club, February 8, 1890" - so says one of the sub- sub- subtitles. I expected this to be daft exposition of antiquated morality and in a way I was not disappointed. Mr. Smith:

Two tests present themselves to my mind as I begin to digest the meaning of this theme. One is the ancient admonition, "Wherefore, let him that thinketh he standeth take heed lest he fall," and the other more modern caution, "Don't monkey with a buzz saw."

The mad charmer! He brought up power tools in a discussion of domestic bliss! He makes a list of different kinds of wives his audience members might have, like the thrifty wife.

You have a thoroughly practical, economical, thrifty, divinity. She is out of bed every morning at daylight, summer and winter, and insists on the same luxury for you. Her keys and her pass-books are her constant companions. She weighs every pound of meat and re-measures every peck of vegetables that crosses your door-sill. She knows to a nicety just how many days the ton of furnace coal should last, and makes the cook's life a misery if she overruns a bucket. In her anxiety to keep them from lying around and making a muss, she burns every scrap of paper as soon as it is opened, including often your most valuable documents. She is the cleanest, most untiring, and most uncomfortable person in the world. When you mildly and kindly suggest there is something else in life besides running a house, on time, like a watch factory, with every scrap of waste paper carefully swept up and locked in the safe over night, she opens up with a cyclone on saving your money, and slaving for you and your children, that reminds you of a Dakota blizzard, so cold and cutting is it, and you crawl down to your office in a limp and dazed condition, wondering what struck you, and whether it wouldn't be a good idea to build a bomb-proof vault in the cellar.

Hilarious! I bet he left 'em crying in their gratins. Or maybe -

She is philanthropic and charitable - overcome with the sufferings of the poor, overwhelmed with the millions crying for bread - so she supports a line of tramps all day from your back yard to your front gate and weeds out your stock of clothes until in the spring, you have hardly a pair of light trousers, thin shoes or straw hat left. When the snow melts you find the hat in the vacant lot below your house, and later on recognize your rum-exchanged breeches dangling from a Johnny-hand-me-down's door near the ferry. You mildly upbraid her, setting forth in your kindest and most winning way the great wrong done to the deserving poor, touching lightly on your own mistfortunes and losses. She replies by comparing your sypathetic heart to a Belgian paving block, and winds up by hoping that you will never, never have to beg your bread from door to door.

These wives of one hundred sixteen years ago don't sound wussy to me.

Or she is aesthetic, with a taste for green grays, dull reds and crushed strawberry pinks. She wears long flowing dresses - a cross between a night-gown and a bath-robe - and has a mania for butterfly-bows. Every individual article in the parlor, the backs of all the chairs, all the rockers, easels, lamps, candlesticks and sofas are tied up with ribbons. She is tied up herself, a broad silk band grabbing her tight around the waist just below her armpits, and a lot of narrow ones dangling from her elbows and throat. All the jars are filled with cat-tails, all the plaques decorated with golden rod and sunflowers.

Under your desk in the library there has stood for years a large, comfortable wicker basket, holding the scraps and waste of your correspondence. Once a week this is emptied. In its place is now a cracker-box set up on end, cretonned inside and out, having an eruption of field daisies on one side and a swelling of velvet cherries with plush leaves on the other. An unpleasantness ensues when you throw anything into this.

Some wives are more inconvenient than others.

Or she is what is known in common parlance as a "joiner." She is one of those women who joins everything, The Central Sewing Society, the Middle Branch of the Orphan Relief Fund, the Western Chapter of Confirmed Lunatics, the Society of Dress Reform, the South Brooklyn and Gowanus Browning Club, the Society for the Prevention of Microbes, for the Spread of the Gospel and the Abatement of Street Nuisances. Your mail is crowded every morning with circulars, notices of meetings, calls for dues, subscription cards headed by a Scriptural quotation, and tailed by "send money to Mrs. So and So, Treas." The Sewing Society meets in the upstairs back from, the Browning Club in the parlor and the Microbes and Lunatics in the library. Every other day in the week there is a committee stowed away somewhere in your house, all talking at once.

Um. Okay. What about them kids, eh?

You have two children, a girl and a boy. They are fat, chubby little tots, and you rejoice in their plump legs and arms. The little one wears a cambric dress with a while apron, and has her hair parted back from a forehead white as snow. The big one - Ned, the boy - wears a jacket and short breeches, punctured with pockets, which are crammed daily with a miscellaneous assortment of hardware.

One night there is a dress parade in the parlor for your benefit. Two Kate Greenaway manikins sidle in. Nellie's hair is banged over her eyes like a Skye terrier's; her dimpled arms lost in balloon sleeves; her plump little legs smothered in a Mother-Hubbard gown some fifteen sizes too large for her. She looks like a Christmas doll at a fair.

Ned breaks your heart. His jacket is so tight he can hardly breathe - his trousers are worse. Both are made of black velvet. Around his waist is an enormous red silk sash; on his poor little feet paper shole shoes with silver buckles. The entire combination affords but one pocket. This is over his left breast, and holds a six-inch-square handkerchief spotted with cologne. He has positive orders not to fool with this lest he muss it. He looks appealingly at you as he tries to wriggle his nervous little hands under his waistband, as if in search of his marbles, and you solemnly vow to roll him the mud and give him one more day of freedom the first chance you get.

"Aren't they just too artistic for anything, my dear?" she says.

You assent, and suggest that they ought to be kept in a glass case, like stuffed birds, with something in a bottle in one corner to keep them from spoiling.

Then you go upstairs and knock the stuffing out of that waste basket with your foot.

I feel sorry for the club members who tried to eat blueberry grunt while Mr. Smith was speaking. I transcribed this at work and cackled like I was brewing potions without a permit.

So it goes. The training so far is a failure. The knowing how, the absorbing question of the day. If you can solve it to-night, they will name gates after you in Prospect Park, and later on conceal your statues in the shrubbery.

But, seriously, where should this training begin? With these wives?

At this point in the speech, I was looking for a vicious punchline, a knife in the back, a kick for the dog. Mr. Smith has pulled a fast one on us all.

To train your children - that is easy. Open your hear and your arms wide for your daughters, and keep them wide open; don't leave that all to their mothers. An intimacy will grow with the years which will fit them for another man's arms and heart when they exchange yours for his. Make a chum of your boy - hail-fellow-well-met, a comrade, a pal. Get down to the level of his boyhood, and bring him gradually up to the level of your manhood. Don't look at him from the second-story window of your fatherly superiority and example. Hang your example. Ten chances to one it is bad. Go to the front yard and play ball with him. When he gets into scrapes, don't thrash him as your father did you. Put your arm around his neck, and say you know it is pretty bad, but that he can count on you to help him out, and that will, every single time, and that if he had let you know earlier it would have been all the easier; and you can bet your bottom dollar that that is the last scrape he will ever get into without you.

The children part of this contract, the Queen Anne trimmings so to speak of this structure, is easy. The foundation and sub-structure is what bothers us. How to train our wives.

Bless their hearts, how shall we train them? Are not all the ills of life largely our own doing? If she considers cleanliness next to Godliness and in the excess of her zeal, cleans the very handle off the front door, should we growl? The restless activity of the worldly woman, the economies of the thrifty wife, the abundant, perhaps ill-advised generosity of the charitable woman, the absorption of the musical and literary, the tears and timidity of the clinging are but the natural outless of characters that need training as do growing vines.

Your part is to lead the delicate tendrils along the supporting trellis of your sympathy, nurturing and fostering each bud until it breaks into flower. Always upward into the sunlight of your appreciation, and never stunted or scarred by the keen pruning knife of your irony or ridicule.

The trouble with half the unhappy homes in the world lies in the pulling apart in such slight matters as likes and dislikes. You have by the very nature of your sex an unlimited freedom. You have your rod and gun, the fields, the water and hills as well as the exchange, the club, the library, laboratory or studio. That little woman up-stairs has spent one-third of her life in the nursery, one-third on her bed recovering from its effects, and but a fragment of the balance away from the cares of your house and its contents. She has busied herself with the maintenance of the social etiquette of your position, the constant watch over the child with her toys, the girl with her books, the maiden with her lovers.

When from out of this dull routine of duty, patience and love - stealing half hours or even whole days - the strong spirit of this once weak child-wife of yours blooms into art, music, literature, charity or science - hold each blossom sacred. It may not be the blossom that you like, but it is a blossom all the same, redolent with perfume, delicate in color, exquisite in form.

Begin the training by strengthening the trellis and adapting it to the peculiarities and necessities of the plant. Then shall your life be crowned with roses and a sweet-smelling savor follow you all your days.

How remarkably reasonable. For his time and place, this speech is curiously modern and empathic. Of course, after the inventions of birth control and doors that work two ways for women too, wives are different and domestic life is different and husbands are different. What remains the same is that finding the funny is still the path to domestic peace.

White Dopes On Punk