"Work before play"

Tanner Manor gave Mom and Dad space aplenty for rearing a large brood of children, but they could not afford maids and gardeners to keep the place in good order. Instead, they used their 8000-sq.-ft. suburban home as a laboratory to teach their children how to work. Raised on the mantra “Work before play,” we pitched in a little every day to keep the house clean inside and the yards tamed outside.
 
Mom and Dad were a united front in teaching us to work. Their goals extended far beyond having a clean, organized home, but we didn’t know that until years later. All we knew was that hard work, family unity, and fun were not always cozy partners.
 
We did know that dirt was the enemy. Mom taught us to go after dirt and disorder with a vengeance. Dad supported her efforts, frequently chiming in with one of his favorite truisms: “Cleanliness is next to godliness.” Although few of us could work with the same speed, gusto, and endurance as Mom, we dutifully washed, wiped, scoured, and scrubbed.

To Mom’s credit, cleaning Tanner Manor was far from drudgery; when combined with people and music, the work magically became fun. On Saturdays, when we were tasked with bigger jobs, Mom made sure we shared our workload with a sibling or two, making our tasks palatable while also building family unity, and to further sweeten our labors she encouraged us to sing or blast music on the radio.
 
Ever with us were Mom’s job charts. Though they varied in size and artistic display, those charts were written reminders of our morning and afternoon assignments. A good psychologist in her own right, Mom always let us have one “free” day a week, and on our birthdays, we didn’t have to “lift a finger,” as she would say. One day, Mark’s friend Hugh Moran stood in our kitchen carefully studying our latest chart and noticed these free days. One of two children, Hugh sighed and wished aloud that he could have a free day, too. Mom had to bite her tongue as she thought somewhat uncharitably, “Every day is a free day for you, buddy!”
 
During my tween years, my morning job was to clean the guest bathroom just off the entry hall—the same bathroom Dad’s clients used. It was only a small powder room, so I should have learned to sparkle it up in record time, but I often cut corners so I wouldn’t be late for school. I began taking my job more seriously when, one day after school, Mom told me how genuinely embarrassed she felt when one the clients had to use the dirty bathroom.
 
Mom was a master organizer and delegator, but she didn’t always consider attitudes and aptitudes. For example, once she and Dad went out of town, leaving Terri in charge of running the house. Very quickly, Mark made it clear he much preferred cooking to cleaning, so she reassigned him as our breakfast chef. Such an idea had never occurred to Mom, but from then on we all took turns cooking breakfast, making lunches, and fixing dinner.

Helping prepare three meals a day for a dozen people meant constant work, mostly for Mom, but we little people did our best to help. One morning on lunch duty, my brother attempted to make a dozen or more sandwiches. Finding the kitchen table occupied, he quietly went into the pantry, spread out fixings on the floor, and ended up smearing peanut butter and honey from one end of the room to the other.
 
Unfortunately, much to Mom’s chagrin, none of us was as quick or clever as she was in the kitchen, but she always needed more helping hands. So, she unabashedly conscripted into her most pressing job anyone who dared walk through our door. She truly believed putting people to work helped them feel more welcome, but working for Mom meant working at her pace, and few could keep up with her. Before officially joining the family, my sister-in-law Ann came to dinner. Immediately overwhelmed by the noise and activity in the house, she tried to stay out of the way by sitting quietly in the kitchen. Zipping around the kitchen, Mom noticed Ann’s idleness and wasted no time sliding some carrots and a sharp knife in front of her. But Ann didn’t cut those carrots fast enough, so Mom promptly snatched the knife out of her hand and—chippity chop!—finished the job herself.
 
Because Mom liked getting things done fast, she purchased some cleaning tools that outsized us. For example, she bought an industrial-sized dust mop so she could cover ground quickly, but for someone of my height and build, that thing was unwieldy. The handle alone was taller than I was, so when it was my turn, I had to do an awkward dust-mop dance up and down the entry stairs and across the hall. We also owned an old industrial canister vacuum that resembled R2D2 from Star Wars. Because it had a very long cord, the little fellow would often get stuck around a corner when we tried moving from one room to the next, so we’d impatiently yank the cord until he came bouncing into view or simply topple over.
 
Whereas Mom mastered frequent cleanings, Dad swooped in a few times a year to help with deep cleanings and to orchestrate yard work. Hardwood flooring covered most of Tanner Manor except for one long, carpeted hallway upstairs. Using a rented carpet cleaner, Dad would spend the better part of a day extracting a year’s worth of dirt while we children hauled and dumped bucket after bucket of filthy water.
 
He attacked the yards similarly although with slightly more frequency and much more delegating. Every several months, when the hedges and weeds had grown out of control, he’d take an early-morning walk around the property, pen and 3x5 card in hand to create a long to-do list. Either unaware or unconcerned about being sexist, he always assigned the outside work to my brothers. Early on a Saturday morning, he’d pace back and forth across their floor in his blue and white jogging pants and white short-sleeve shirt exclaiming, “You’re sleeping your brains in the train oil!” While moans and groans emerged from their beds, he’d whip out his task list, and—just like that—the boys were officially recruited to an all-day fight against the foliage.

When the boys finally made their way outside, Daken would inevitably claim ownership of the electric hedge trimmer leaving Scott and Bryan to pick up the clippings. It didn’t take long for the two of them to turn on Daken for taking “the easy job” while he claimed the title of “the hardest worker in the family.” Often, their friends would stop by, inviting them to play football or go to the beach, occasionally even offering to pitch in order to speed the work along. They might have finished sooner if Bryan hadn’t slowed everyone down by continually cracking jokes. Instead, they usually wrapped up the jungle job right about the time the sun set.
 
I recall Daken, Scott, and Bryan taking turns mowing the lawns in all six yards. Taking pride in their work, they agreed the worst part wasn’t the mowing; it was borrowing a lawn mower from Balk’s Hardware downtown. Because the company once broke our lawn mower, Les Balk agreed to let our family use one from the store “anytime.” I’m sure he regretted his offer a thousand times over and wished he’d replaced our lawn mower because, inevitably, his machine would break down mid-job, and my brothers would sheepishly exchange it for another one in working order.
 
When the folks were preparing for the double wedding of my two oldest sisters, the boys got some extra help from Ray, my soon-to-be brother-in-law. While trying his Texas best to clean up the yards, he slipped under the lawn mower on a small hill where the grass was still wet. Just six years old, I was horrified to hear that Ken, my other brother-in-law-to-be, was out hunting in the grass for bloody appendages. Ray, in his characteristic way of not taking himself too seriously, nicknamed himself “Three Toes” and later entertained his children with stories about a main character with the same name. 
 
Even though the boys often worked all Saturday outside, we girls were not off the hook for weekend work. We spent our Saturdays inside doing all manner of domestic work—scrubbing baseboards, mopping and waxing floors, polishing furniture and chandeliers, reorganizing closets, and dusting. My favorite assignment by far was dusting the library, where I’d get lost for hours perusing hardbound encyclopedia sets and other books with fancy covers.
 
Wanting us to learn to work and have fun, my parents tried to balance the two maxims, “All work and no play make Jack a dull boy” and “Finish with a swim.” While we worked together to keep Tanner Manor fairly clean and organized, we always looked forward to doing something fun at the end. Often, it was literally “a swim” in the McDonalds’s pool next door.
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