Tie One On

I never thought that taking a walk on a Sunday morning would involve dressing a teenage boy. Fresh air, maybe, some nice conversation with my walking buddy, some semblance of physical activity, although, let’s face it, we are not walking at any kind of clip that results in sweat. But teenage boys? I don’t even have one of those.

BD and I took our normal walk this past Sunday, after I dropped my daughters off at Sunday school. The air was warmer than it should have been on a November morning, and the acrid stench of burning leaves hung heavy in the air, respiratory issues be damned. BD lives in a neighborhood that is so white bread Middle America that you think you are walking on a set in Hollywood. It’s like being on Elm Street, only without Freddy Krueger. Cats are sunning themselves on front steps. Dogs are wagging their tails and chasing butterflies. The squeal of children and the hum of leaf blowers punctuate the air. Any second, you expect the Kool-Aid man to come bursting out of a garage, screaming, “Oh Yeah!” In fact, to further cement the illusion, BD leaves her older school age children at home and carries a walkie-talkie through the neighborhood in case they need her. Which begs the question, why not a string and two tin cans?

Anyway, the walk was a normal walk. For us, something odd always happens while walking, so expecting the unexpected is our norm. We had passed maybe three houses when I noticed the biggest slug to ever ooze out of the grass was working its way across the road. I am not talking a slug the size of a cocktail weinie. This thing was longer than my hand from middle finger tip to wrist. BD almost stepped on it because she thought it was a stick. We stopped walking and looked at it for a while, amazed and disgusted at the same time. BD decided that we couldn’t leave it in the road to get run over, as a slug of this size had clearly been alive for a while. For all we knew, that slug could have been the same age as one of our kids, certainly as old as someone’s kid. We couldn’t just leave it there to die.

But how to move it? Neither of us was interested in touching it, because, yuck, it’s a slug. BD suggested I get a stick. So I did. A small stick, a twig, really. I tried to scoot it over to the side of the road, but all it did was ball up to the size of a mini Three Musketeers bar. I couldn’t scoot it with the stick. I was merely taunting it. BD suggested a bigger stick. Notice BD had no interest in getting the slug out of the road herself, preferring to supervise my actions instead. The yard next to us, however, had no sticks, certainly none the size of, say, the slug. I found another twig, and calling upon my prowess with chopsticks, plucked it off the ground like a piece of sushi and flung it in the closest yard.

“That was my good deed for the day,” I said proudly as I tossed the sticks into the yard as I had the slug moments before. And we continued walking. We covered the usual topics, our children, our husbands, our in-laws, with an occasional rant on politics or religion. BD and I like to think we can discuss the bigger things as fluently as those from our own spheres. We thought no more of the slug, and kept walking at a less than brisk pace.

When we approached the mid-point of the walk, we passed a house where a mom and her teenage son stood on the front porch. She stood behind him, so I don’t recall what she had on, but he was wearing a suit and dress shirt. He called out to us, “Do you know how to tie a tie?” BD yelled back, “No, I don’t, but she does,” she meaning me. Now, I need to point out here that BD’s husband wears a tie every day to work. Mine, on the other hand, wears one maybe once a year. In fact, he specifically chose his career based on the fact that a tie is not required. (He wants me to clarify that the previous statement is not entirely true.) So while neither of us might know how to tie a tie, she certainly has more exposure to the process. I also did not grow up with a father at home, so there was no tying history from which to draw. I had to search the far corners of my memory’s attic for how to tie a tie.

“I’ll give it a try,” I said, walking across his lawn. “It’s been a while, but let’s see if I remember.” The teenage boy walked over to me, but his healthy dousing of cologne got to me before he did. I stood on my tip toes and tried to remember, around, around, up from behind and dive down the middle. I did what I remembered, and the poor boy looked like a hobo. BD suggested I try again, since it sort of almost maybe possibly looked like it was close to being right. I undid the whole mess and tried again. Around, around, up, then down. Pinch, tug, push. Voila. I tied a tie.

“How’s that?” I asked him.
“Pretty good, thanks!” He answered, then bounded back across the lawn and into his house.

BD and I continued our walk. I was filled with a sense of pride at my tiny little slice of community service.
“Who knew I could tie a tie? That's two good deeds in one day!” I said.
“I did,” she said. “You know how to do all sorts of things.”
I smelled my hand, which was covered in teenage boy cologne, then held it up to BD's face so she too could smell the folly of youth.

In some strange way, BD is right. I can do things that I wouldn’t think I could. Or that I don’t realize I can. I am sure we all feel that way, but when called upon to serve, we can conjure up a decent tie knot.

“Only in my neighborhood would someone stand on the front porch and wait for people to walk by to tie ties,” BD said.
“Yeah, in my neighborhood they would just go without, like loafers without socks at the country club. Besides, in my neighborhood, we never lay eyes upon one another. It helps us to imagine we are living on estates rather than in peeping distance of one another.”

I don’t know what you see or do when taking a walk, but me, it’s slugs and neckties and small opportunities for public service.