Could he earn a merit badge for laziness? This father is determined to give it a try
It’s too bad I was already a fully functioning adult when the movie “The Big Lebowski” introduced us to a character hailed as possibly the laziest man in the world. Back in my early teens, it’s a title I’d have been in strong contention for.
Not that I’d have gotten off my duff to actually compete for it, but anyone who puts in that much effort is surely disqualified anyway.
I made so fine a show of doing absolutely nothing back then that my uncles still shout the “I don’t waaaaaaana!” whine that made me infamous in the family. It’s still my walk-up song 40 years later.
My parents, on the other hand, were a cinch for the hardest-working couple title. They could have claimed it just for their trick of regularly managing to get such a world-class loafer as my young self off my duff to muck out horse stalls, set fence posts, milk goats and split firewood.
But that wasn’t enough for those show-offs. As an encore, they somehow turned me around so completely that now I find it tough to sit still when there’s someone around with a big job to tackle.
The changed attitude served me well for many years. But now that I have a kid who’s getting ready to take his fledgling flight out of the nest and head to college, I see there can be virtue in doing nothing. I also see that I’m woefully out of practice at it.
I don’t know that I’ve worked harder at anything than I did at forcing myself to do nearly nothing for months while I watched my older son figure out how to tackle one of the biggest jobs of his young life.
The job was earning his Eagle Scout rank before the hard deadline of his 18th birthday.
A lot of Scout parents say kids either earn Eagle when they’re 15 years old, before a driver’s license opens up a wide new world, or sometime after 17 and a half, when they begin to understand the ruthless speed of an oncoming deadline.
I thought that was just a joke when I watched my older son earn the final rank before Eagle as a high school freshman. That gave plenty of time for the truth to set in right on schedule six months before he turned 18, when he began a tense race against the calendar to plan, win approval for and pull off an Eagle service project while he still had the chance.
It was a race full of problems that would have been easy for me to clear away for him if I took the lead on things like fundraising, scheduling his pitch meetings and making checklists.
But the boy quickly made it clear that he’d rather lose this race than let anyone carry him over the finish line, so I did my best to channel my 14-year-old self.
Any time I felt like I’d go nuts if I didn’t get off my duff and do something he hadn’t gotten to — send an email or schedule a project workday — I’d silently chant the mantra that was once so familiar:
“I don’t waaaaaaana!”
It felt like I’d explode from the tension sometimes, but my hard work of doing nothing paid off exactly a week before my son’s 18th birthday when I watched him and some friends take pride in installing a little free library they’d built and then sweep off the pavers they’d reset alongside it.
My new Eagle Scout’s little brother is just one rank away from Eagle himself. He still has a couple of years before the deadline of his 18th birthday.
That leaves plenty of time for me to work on my laziness merit badge. Scouts must have one for a life skill as important as that, right?
I should check, but you what? I don’t waaaaaaana!
Richard Espinoza is a former editor of the Johnson County Neighborhood News. You can reach him at respinozakc@yahoo.com.
