Next to godliness

I like cleanliness.

When our boys were young, their two little hot wheel runaround pals named Ian and Evan moved away.

A few months later, we visited their upstairs apartment in a large brick house painted gray. Wading through the rooms knee deep in randomness, I wondered if I dare leave my boys to play and possibly be swallowed whole by swamps of stuff.

As I recall, I made a flimsy excuse and darted for the door, my sons in tow.

The generation of our children is one I know more closely than most. Now young adults, my children and their friends buoy me with selflessness and candor. They would save the world, or at the very least proclaim it worth their efforts.

Most of them are graduates of rented student houses rife with late night schmoozery. I've never been in one of those communal digs where bathrooms or kitchens got a once over more often than maybe once every rent cycle, which could be months or years depending on the student migration timeline.

I remember my own collegiate avalanche of under-managed personal debris, the dredge of deadlines daunting me from term to term. Then in nursing school I shared a small flat with Grace, a contralto at the institute of music who was rather disciplined as I recall. I think we did the dishes and I can't remember bathroom chores becoming points of tension.

Gradually I think I just ran out of slovenly excuses, cleaned up my act and proceeded on to quasi-ordered adulthood.  Messy, at times. Dirty, not so much.

Those people of the upstairs rental I mentioned earlier? I remember the parents. They were from Montana or Idaho or some such windswept scape. She was soft spoken, evanescent, kind. He was a thinker. He told me once he couldn't imagine why a soul would ask him if he believed in God or wanted to accept Jesus as his savior. (Not that I had, or would. It was just a subject that came up.) I'd never met anyone so sure of the intimacy of that question and the sanctity of inner space.

No matter how well our long abandoned Ian and Evan learn to breach the creep of stuff, the bilge of pesky matter, I'm confident these sons will be alright. And so will mine and all their fond companions.

Unfazed by tidy elders, let them brave this unkempt world.

Lithograph by Ehrgott, Forbriger & Co., President Lincoln writing the Proclamation of Freedom