A Job Begun Should Be Finished

By CHARLES M. GUTHRIE

of the editorial page staff

published by the StarTribune

January 19, 1957

ALTHOUGH experience has taught me that if you want a thing done right you should hire someone to do it, I firmly believe that a job once attempted should be carried through to horrendous completion. Some day I hope to get this conviction off the drawing board and into practice.
   Finish what you start, I keep telling myself. Any job worth doing is worth doing as well as you're able. My wife has lived by this code always, fatiguing me with her enterprise. And her attitude, to some extent, has infected the kids. All but the youngest, that is. In him she may have encountered a rock mired firmly in the paternal slough of "let it go until next week."
 

   HIS COURSE, it is true, is not definitely fixed. Attitude and temperament patterns are in the molding process. The twig still is being bent. There may come a day when he finishes what he starts. But up to now the prod has had to be applied relentlessly. The prodder is his mother. I have been slack, I confess, being unable, in good conscience, to preach what I have not practiced.
   Our son's notion of cleaning his room is to hang his pajamas on a door-knob, push his discarded socks under the bed, and transfer books, puzzles, crayons, phonograph records and guns from floor to dresser-top. He has a place for everything and puts everything anywhere.
   My wife says all 8-year-olds are like that and he will catch on "if we set the right example and insist that he do what he's told." There's the rub, that part about setting the right example. He has seen the old man abandon too many jobs. And the fact that this is less often by design than by the press of affairs is beside the point. The example has not been good.

   ONE SURE WAY to save him from permanent indolence, I suppose, is to stop being indolent myself. But for me this is easier said than done, even with parental duty as the spur. It would impose a new way of life, a life bereft of those little distractions that give meaning to existence. I doubt that I could ever bring it off.

Adlai Stevenson/ Dwight Eisenhower

   I have, however, listed all the jobs crying for completion and affixed the list to the kitchen bulletin board by way of inspiration. It reminds me each morning of a certain situation in the basement, where there is yet to be finished a paint job begun shortly before Ike beat Adlai the first time. The most prominent wall expanses have been treated but sections back of the work bench, furnace and hot water heater molder in neglect, as does a corner area blocked by an ancient refrigerator.
   The over-all effect is not good. There persists an atmosphere of neglect and decay, an atmosphere to inspire the likes of Edgar Allen Poe, one that more than a day or two of painting would take to eliminate. Were my deeds and dreams one, the place long ago would have been rejuvenated entirely, a recreation room installed complete with hi-fi, television and ping pong table and not a spiderweb or box of tin cans in sight.

   HIGH on my work list, too, is a bookshelf project, recumbent since the Japanese surrender. It started as an expedient to get books off the attic floor, where they blocked access to the stuff for the Salvation Army. Boards laboriously torn from orange and apple crates were used in the initial phase. The initial phase is what the effort is still in, the builder finally realizing that his work was a makeshift. He also ran out of nails and decided to give up until another day. I shall attack it afresh when adequate material is at hand and I establish some order of procedure.
   Also on the list is a portable back fence. This was carried to the basement last fall, to be painted, tightened and repaired. The fence must be returned to the yard ere tulip time, my wife keeps telling me, so why don't I get busy? I fully intend to.

   THERE ARE other chores too, such as fixing up the wren house that fell from the lilac bush some months ago, and resuming the job of card-indexing the Christmas card list, but these are mere trifles.
   By diligent week-end application, the major chores could be finished by May and, if the madness persisted, more week-ends then could be shot in planting, fertilizing and yard cleaning.
   The prospect, even when leavened by the thought that such enterprise would make my son aspire to my new example, seems dismal. I like to think that with the passage of time, and regardless of papa, the boy will become more like his mother.

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