Green Clip-On

It all started with a child’s green clip-on tie.
It was not your typical clip-on. It is the clip-on and the only clip-on that my son’s school accepts as part
of its winter uniform. Purchasing it was the sort of special order that takes six weeks to arrive from a
unique distributor.
Enter a conscientious kid. One who doesn’t want to disappoint.
Picture the very first Monday that tie is required. And it’s missing.
“Where did you see it last?” I asked in between sips of bad coffee. The grind setting was accidentally on
espresso which made the drip-coffee grainy and gross. I would have re-made some, but the tie,
remember?
“I wore it to the wedding and then took it off right when we got home so we can watch rugby.”
(This was all true. He wore it to the wedding we attended Saturday. This confirmation did not ease my
under-caffeinated-Monday-morning panic. It only called to mind the conversation we shared that
Saturday morning, the one in which his mother interjected what a bad idea it would be to wear a school-
sanctioned tie to a wedding when he has other options. To this suggestion he said, “But it looks the
best.”)
“Where were you when you took it off?”
A lightbulb went off. “Your room!”
He sprinted off in the of my room as I shifted focus to my three-year-old, who was having difficulty
accepting the fact that a skirt is not part of her winter uniform.
“But I want a skirt!”
(There is no reasoning with a four-nado mid-swirl. You just have to get out of the way and hope it passes
without your needing to grovel in the storm cellar to survive. No description in words can ever match
the intensity and poignancy of the abrupt emotional upheaval resulting from the smallest of
discomforts.)
On to my other daughter. She started attending a makeup gymnastics class because the part she earned
in a ballet switched up our schedule. What this means is that either my wife or I need to leave the house
at seven in the morning with not only her lunch packed, but her dinner, too, not to mention with all her
gymnastics gear. God forbid her hair wasn’t in a bun upon departure. If so, she would later suffer the
Russian wrath of all the Russian shame that comes with showing up a Russian gymnastics class with hair
out of place.
“Do you have everything you need?”
“Yes.”
That was when my wife, summoning the preternatural instincts of a Bat’s echolocation, shouts from
across the house.
“What about your toe shoes?”

“My toe shoes!”
So she’s off at that point, and I begin to debate whether I want show up to work late and fed or on time
and hungry. If I had my typical five cups of coffee by then, I wouldn’t have felt so hungry. And if my
morning’s stretch and meditation weren’t interrupted by my four year old’s request to eat before I had
the chance to make breakfast, I might have been able to summon the patience to soberly measure such
a situation.
“I spilled the milk,” my youngest says in the casual nonchalance she failed to find when we told her she
couldn’t wear a skirt that day.
“So clean it up,” I said with equal calm.
“I can’t,” she screamed, returning to Stage-4-level winds.
It is at a time like this that, in all neutrality, I would love to turn spilt milk into a teachable moment.
Instead, I keep doing what needs to be done in order to get out the door.
My son was doing his best to keep his composure as he came back downstairs. “Not in your room,” he
said in series of staccato utterances.
“Today might not be the day for your tie, that’s all.”
“There’s an inspection, dad. A uniform inspection,” he said in that same worrisome staccato.
“Well, keep looking then.”
My middle daughter returned with one toe shoe and her knitting kit.
“Where’s the other?”
“I-dunno,” she hummed in a shrug.
“Well drop the yarn and look for it!”
Lunches took me longer to pack that day because I spent my earliest moments keeping my way-too-
early-rising four-year old happy and fed. Also, the dishwasher hadn’t run the night before which forced
me to reimagine the lunch menu with more disposable options. I didn’t make breakfast like I usually do.
Cereal to the rescue.
It was when I pressed my one more time to get dressed into pants instead of a skirt that I realized the
dogs hadn’t had their walk. We have been returning home to the smell of rancid urine on the regular
lately because my older dog is experiencing incontinence. She has bad hips and hates to walk any
further than she absolutely has too. Then she pees uncontrollably all over the kitchen floor as she tries
unsuccessfully to let herself out.
It’s cold these fall mornings and I am in nothing buy my underwear out the back door with soupy coffee
in one hand and the leash our puppy tore up in the other, nudging our elderly dog to the grass as I listen
to the pup claw the door frame out of impatience. I thought that this was not the way I wanted to die
before switching the leash to our energetic pup who pulled me, causing me to spill whatever was left of
the overground java.

I enter the kitchen hearing my wife chastising our daughter for missing one tap shoe. She was barely
audible next to my four-year-old who was rolling on the milk-sticky floor, refusing to dawn her pants for
the day. I stood her up. “You can cry all you want, but you’re wearing these pants.” After force-dressing
her, I put her in my truck and start the engine, buckling her up to restrain her to return to a daughter
missing a tap shoe and a son missing a tie.
Once Inside, I noticed that the pronounced lack of tantruming had a profoundly positive impact on the
search for the missing items. My son was in the kitchen, methodically retracing hist steps from the day
before. My daughter was in a calm dialog with my wife about where the missing tap shoe could be. I saw
that it was already 7:30, our departure time.
“Has anyone eaten breakfast?”
Of course no one had.
“Well it’s bananas in the car, then!”
That’s when we lost whatever thread of hope remained that morning as the kids, stressed and hungry,
would sooner skip breakfast than eat bananas.
My wife found the missing tap shoe in her car and loaded it into my daughter’s bag in the kitchen, the
same bag I later forgot and had to turn back around to get. My son wore a sweater to try and cover up
his missing tie.
My wife called and put a nice little pep talk on speaker that helped the four of us recalibrate before
starting another long week in the life of a busy family.
By the time I dropped my kids off at their school, I was already 10 minutes late to mine. All I could think
of was those teenagers I teach, sitting unsupervised in my classroom. I helped my youngest daughter
out of the truck and that’s when, standing there in the empty parking lot, my older daughter demanded
her 30-second hug, a nice ritual we began on a day when there was time to spare.
It took 25 seconds for the miracle to sink in.