The Unrounded Man

Robert Heinlein once wrote "Specialization is for insects." That was actually the payoff line for a much longer thing, a list of all the things that Big Daddy Heinlein imagined that a well-rounded man should be able to do. I don't remember the list exactly, but was things like ride a horse, raise a child, write a song, defend the weak, skin an animal, use differential equations, join a comically inept left-wing revolutionary movement, drive a nail, program a computer, sew well, die well... Oh, I don't remember what all.

Apparently I'm not so well-rounded, because it turns out that I can't do a lot of things that a man, a REAL man, should probably be able to do.

I cannot, for example, come up with good impromptu Halloween costumes. Some people, you give them a half an hour and some paper plates, aluminum foil and socks, and they transform themselves into Bib Fortuna, complete with tentacles. But me? Pfft. A houseful of clothes and craft stuff, and the best I can do is put on a cowboy hat and tell people "I'm going as me, assuming I had ever been in Lonesome Dove." (Not to digress, but the best move you can make on Halloween, guys, is to rent the largest, fluffiest, pinkest rabbit costume you can find. You'll be mocked mercilessly on the way to the Halloween party, but once the sun goes down and all the girls in the skimpy witch and vampire costumes start getting cold, who do you think they're going to want to hug? That's right, the guy in the fluffy, warm rabbit costume. Trust me.)

This extends into other forms of weekend craft, such as making "macaroni art". Some people can pull off a pretty good copy of "The Last Supper" on a cookie sheet. Me, my macaroni art looks like either a Rothko or a Pollock, depending on how much coffee I've had. And while Rothko and Pollock got away with it in the world of high art, showing up at the county fair with a macaroni version of a Rothko just doesn't cut much mustard.

Some men - manly men, I guess - can wear cowboy boots. I cannot. Actually, I can wear them okay, I guess, I just can't get them back off. They stick as though they've been super-glued to my feet. I watch westerns on TV where guys pull off their boots without so much as a grunt. How do they do that? Me, I'm there with a bench vise, a can of WD-40 and a knife, and I still can't get them off. This probably just means that all the cowboy boots I've ever owned were the wrong size. But I have a new problem these days: my left foot is now larger than my right foot. A while back I sent an order in to a specialist boot-maker who claimed that they could and would make any kind of cowboy boot you could ever want, no matter how big, small, deformed, or mismatched your feet were. So I sent in an order and included the measurements of my feet. About a week later they cancelled the order by email with the apology "Maybe you'd be better off with flip-flops." If I had been a cowboy, I would most likely have died with my boots on, because I wouldn't have been able to get the damned things off.

Not that I can wear flip-flops either. After about six steps they always turn sideways, heels outboard, and threaten to trip me. Some people can wear flip-flops for hours. Some people can probably run a marathon in flip-flops. Me, I can't get from the pool to the back door without something going horribly awry. And I tend to leave my flip-flops outside. Normally I don't spend much time worrying about being stung by insects. I don't LIKE being stung, but it isn't something I really worry about very much. But somehow, I look at my flip-flops lying out on the patio and I know, I just know, that something hideous lurks within them, that I'll end up having to go to the ER with some kind of mutant scorpion stinger hanging out of my foot. Most times, I just leave the flip-flops alone and take my chances barefoot (once I got stung on the testicle by a wasp, and remember thinking "If this turns into a serious problem and I have to go the ER, there's simply no good way to explain how this happened.")

And I'm not good with revolutionary movements of any sort. "Come, brother," the leader says. "It's time to storm la Bastille!" And I purse my lips and say "But, Star Trek is coming up in an hour, and it's the one with the Yangs and the Kohms, and I haven't seen it in ages!"

And, despite all the nails I've driven in my life, I'm just no good at all at driving nails. Period. For a while I thought I just had crappy hammers, so I bought several new ones, of varying design and weight. For a while I thought I was being tormented by crappy nails, so I bought bigger nails. Nothing helped. At least a quarter of the time something goes horribly awry. The nail shoots off into the lower stratosphere, never to be seen again. The nail bends. The nail falls out. The board splits. I miss the nail entirely and mash a half-moon-shaped dent in the wood (or, if I'm using the framing hammer, I convert a circular region of the wood into a passable simulation of cube steak). People have actually tried to help me with this. Some urge me to choke up on the hammer and not swing so hard. Others tell me to get a bigger hammer and just wallop the thing, the theory apparently being that if you can sink the nail in two blows, there are fewer opportunities for it to bend. Nothing helped. Though these days, I AM better at not hitting myself with the hammer. (Once I was mowing a field of alfalfa and bent one of the triangular cutting blades in the windrower. I took the blade off and laid it on the drawbar, thinking I'd pound it flat with a big hammer. But every time I hit it, the bent tooth jumped ten feet in the air. So I thought "I'll hold it down with just the very tip of my left thumb." I ended up hitting my thumb so hard I tore my thumbnail off. My grampa also took off his left thumbnail with an axe, so maybe there's a genetic component to my futility with hammers.)

So here I stand, a man in full, but decidedly unrounded. Big Daddy Heinlein would be SO disappointed.