THE PARABLE OF THE TOOTHBRUSH

a poem in IV parts, ending with a line from Lewis Carroll

I

According to my father I was going to be
one of four things: the first four-minute miler,
first Catholic President, first American Pope,
or the guy that broke Babe Ruth’s record.

Roger Bannister broke the four minute barrier
when I was fourteen, the same year I was
humiliated by losing a footrace on the beach,
in front of people, to my mother. (I’d never seen
her run before, had no idea that mothers could.)

I was twenty-one the November Kennedy
was elected, and next September, when
Roger Maris hit his sixty-first home run
off Tracy Stallard, to beat the Red Sox 1-0,
I was already five years out of baseball.

There still hasn’t been an American Pope,
but even Dad, were he alive, must admit
that ship was still centuries away. How
could I not be disappointed in myself?

II

I’m a systems person; when I find a way of doing
something that seems, logically, like the shortest,
most efficient way, I lock into that. I curse
when I catch myself, say, turning the wrong way
and having to take an extra step between
fridge and toaster while I fix my breakfast.

I years ago perfected my system for brushing
my teeth. Before squeezing out the toothpaste,
I hold the brush under the warm water, then
tap it three times on the edge of the sink
to remove excess water; only then do I apply
the paste. I have no scientific evidence; I just
at some point in the distant past decided that
this seemed like the most efficient system for
applying paste to create the perfect timed
release, the 61st home run of tooth-brushing.

III

When my daughter Kathleen was four or five
she didn’t like to brush her teeth. She’d go
into the bathroom and close the door and run
the water and make gargling noises, and then
announce to us that she was ready for bed.
When we found out, we decided one of us
would go in and brush our teeth with her.

The first time Kathleen and I brushed our teeth
together, I did my little system and Kathleen,
as soon as my toothbrush was out of the way,
wetted hers. When I tapped my brush
three times on the edge of the sink, she,
very carefully, tapped hers three times.

IV

This is for all of us who feel like failures
because we haven’t lived up to our potential.
Let us consider who sets the bar, how high,
and why. Pope Jack the First might have a nice
blue-collar sort of ring to it, but realistically,
I don’t see a lot of white smoke in my future,
and by my father’s exalted standards,
I’ll be O for four.

But in Kathleen’s eyes,
I was the Maestro of the Toothbrush, the gold
standard as to How Things Should Be Done.

Reality is, as always, somewhere in between.
Can we live with that?

We stand between the generation before us
and the one comes after.

This very betweenness is the only statistic
that means anything, the only statistic
that means anything,

the only statistic that means anything.