Seeking Gold

Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.

Robert Frost

My husband’s current hobby is gold prospecting. He loves wandering out in the hills, trekking through stream beds looking for tiny flecks of the yellow treasure. Sometimes he brings home two or three 5-gallon buckets of mud from a likely geologic site to pour through the complex contraptions of sluices and separators which he designed and built himself. It’s a big moment when a flash of heavy sparkle separates itself from the rest of the dross and glows like the treasure it is. Currently, he is richer by less than an eighth of a teaspoon. Total. But he’s a consummate optimist, so he keeps looking.

I can see now how that attitude might have saved me considerable grief when my kids were growing up.  For a couple of years, I did daycare for a brother and sister. Son #3, at age five and already cognizant of the necessity of teaching appropriate social behavior, came racing into the house one afternoon to report that four-year-old Adam had peed into an abandoned bottle in the field next to our house instead of bothering to come in to go to the bathroom. “Well,” I said. “That’s not OK!”

“I know,” said Son #3 complacently. “So, I poured it over his head!” Arrrggghhh! I didn’t bother to mention that little scenario to Adam’s mom. And I trust that Son #3 is not using this potty training method on his two-year-old this summer.

Son #5 had a bosom buddy down the street with whom he shared a lot of adventures–still does, in fact, but now they have to take a wife and four kids each. When they were six-ish, they hiked down the hill to the local 7-11 (without permission) and wandered up and down the aisles looking at the treats their mothers were too cheap to buy. On the way out of the store, one of them pocketed a package of gum. A sharp-eyed clerk grabbed them and called the cops—luckily, one was parked conveniently nearby. We two moms got the calls about shoplifting and showed up within minutes. When we pulled into the parking lot, the cop was reading the boys the riot act—”you’d better not ever take something without paying again or I’ll slap you both in jail”, etc. Fortunately, my son didn’t notice when the cop winked at me.

Both boys were terrified. Until he started high school, Son #5 was looking over his shoulder every time he did something “iffy,”—which was actually quite often. But the memory of that incident kept him on the straight and narrow more than anything his dad or I ever said. At least until he and his buddy plotted to smuggle a few cases of Mountain Dew over the fence to Son #5 at the Missionary Training Center when he was on his way to Costa Rica. Since no canned drink machine at BYU carried anything with caffeine, they figured they could make a killing selling the soda for a buck a piece. Just a few extra funds for the mission, right? His buddy’s mom got suspicious when she was vacuuming her son’s room and found six cases of Mountain Dew stacked up in his closet. Neither one of the boys has ever been good at keeping secrets, so they were busted. And Son #5 ended up a leader in his mission instead of being sent home for insubordination.

Just this week, Daughter #2 was talking about the girl who was her nemesis in high school. She couldn’t even remember what it was about the girl that irritated her, but she shuddered when she discovered that the parents of this girl lived in her new neighborhood. It was likely that Daughter #2 would encounter this frenemy at least once or twice when the daughter visited her parents. “How’d it go when that happened?” I asked her.

“Well,” said Daughter #2. “She didn’t turn out to be nearly as mean as I remembered.”

It wasn’t just at my house, either. I had a student in a junior honors English class who came to me in confidence one afternoon after school and reported that the very pretty cheerleader who sat behind her had copied off her paper during a test. I called in the cheerleader, told her about the accusation, and asked if it was true. There were some tears, some discussion about how if she didn’t do well in my class, she might not get a scholarship, and finally, an agreement. She would take a zero on the test and promise to never cheat again in my class.

A year later, the cheerleader, dressed in cap and gown and looking regal as she marched passed me in measured cadence to the graduation processional, leaned over to whisper in my ear. “Mrs. Voorhies, I kept my promise.”

I wasted a lot of sleepless nights worrying about some kid or other who I was sure was on a downhill skid, never to be redeemed. Then it occurred to me that my husband is right. Given some time, some careful attention, and a chance to wash away the muck, there’s gold shining beneath the surface in all of us.