My Father the Janitor

“God resists the proud, But gives grace to the humble.”

Proverbs 3:34

When I was a kid, my Dad had the coolest summer job ever.  Being a teacher in a small, private college, his pay wasn’t as high as most college professors get, so he got a job as a janitor and all-around handyman at a local youth camp.

I thought Dad was the luckiest man in the world.  He got raise all kinds of animals—horses, goats, sheep, chickens, and pigs—and he got to clean both the boys and the girls restrooms.  I would often wonder why he would teach during the year if he had the opportunity that this camp presented.  Plus, it was a summer camp!  The highlight of the summer is summer camp, and he got to work there.  Incredible. 

While he was there, he built barns, mended fences, fed the animals, and cleaned the restrooms.  If you’re wondering which is worse, cleaning an animal stall or cleaning the bathroom at a youth camp, wonder no longer.  Most civilized people can’t tell the difference.  If I were to choose, give me the animal stall any day.    As kids, we rode ponies, fed chickens and were attacked by ducks at the camp.  It was glorious. 

The camp itself was run by the church we attended, which also ran the college where he taught.  If you’ve ever been involved in such a situation, you know how intertwined each “branch” of this ministry could be.  We saw the same people at church that we saw at the camp that Dad saw at the college.  In fact, most of the camp counselors were the students that Dad taught in the school throughout the year.   Everyone we knew saw Dad working there.  We boys were proud. 

When I got older and the camp closed—flood of 1985—I began to wonder why Dad would take such a job during the summer.   While my younger self thought that this job was the pinnacle of Dad’s life, I began to realize that it wasn’t the most prestigious work he could have found.  Think about it:  he, a well-educated fellow, had to clean up after horses, children and other nasty creatures for pay.  Not only that, he was seen doing this in front of most of the people we associated with at church as well as the students that he had to lead and teach during the school year. 

After I recovered from the glamour of his job, I asked him why he took it.  He could have probably gotten something else during that time, something that wouldn’t have been so close to the people we knew.   He could have gotten a job at a place that wasn’t connected to our entire lives there in that ministry.  He could have been a summer school teacher or a worker in a grocery store.  His pay wasn’t all that great at the summer camp, so I know he could have made more money. 

But money wasn’t why he was a janitor and a farmhand at a summer camp.  He saw the writing on the wall, and he knew that three boys living in the house throughout the entire summer was a recipe for disaster.  We were little animals, ready to destroy civilization whenever we could get the chance.  Broken windows, broken furniture and broken bones were the common themes that streamed through our lives and Dad got a job that wouldn’t wreck our house.  When he could, he’d take us down to the camp for a little break, making sure that we were busy every second of the day.  During that time at that camp, I rode my first horse, fed my first pig and was attacked viciously by a duck.    Dad made us help him mend fences, build barns and, yes, even clean up the restrooms.  By the end of those days, the only thing broken was our will to disobey, fight or destroy. 

Those summers where Dad was the farm hand showed us that he wasn’t above the dirty work.  He was educated, but that did not mean he was elitist. 

When he took that job as a janitor the people who knew him and respected him were contained in his world.  They were the co-workers, the ministers and the students who saw him as a respected teacher and friend.  When he took that job, however, his image could have been changed.  When a teacher’s respect or dignity is placed in question, his effectiveness could also be changed and questioned.  He risked his image by taking that job, yet he took it anyway.  I finally asked him why he took that job as a janitor and farmhand.

He said, “I had three boys depending on me.” 

Three little boys—mostly dirty and destructive.

Sometimes, Jonah Can Bark Like a Seal

Although Jonah has had a cold or two, he entered the realm of the real-deal sickness during his seventh month. 

I remember it clearly:

We were visiting my in-laws, the Beckmans, in Cincinnati and, as usual, Jonah had his room and we had ours.  He was sleeping about thirty feet from us, right down the hall.  I was asleep at about 5am—which is my custom—and I heard a sound that scared me to my very soul. 

It was like I was forced to listen to hours of speeches given by my high school football coach:  mostly loud noises punctuated even louder noises.  I opened my eyes and concentrated on the sound. 

It was a seal barking. 

The Beckmans had bought a seal, and I was standing in my underwear watching a circus inhabited only by orangutans and third graders.  (I had fallen asleep and I quickly moved to “weird dream land”).  I awoke again to the sound of the seal in the other room, and I realized that sound came from Jonah.  I jumped out of bed, ran to his room where he coughed again, and I thought that he had caught something in his throat.  I picked him up, forced his mouth open and searched for whatever was in there.  Aside from my finger, I couldn’t find anything.  There wasn’t really anything in his throat:  he was making that noise all by his little self. 

By the time I had finished searching for the thing in his throat, Sunday staggered into the room looking for the seal. 

She asked, “Was that Jonah?”

I said, “Yep.  I think he’s got a cold.”

She said, “Sounds like he’s a little seal.”

I said, “Don’t you mean a little horse?”

She said, “No.  Don’t you think he sounds like a seal?”

Still mostly asleep, I said, “Watch out for the third graders.  They don’t get along with the orangutans.”

She said, “What?”

I said, “Never mind.” 

We stood there, waiting for him to cough again as we wondered how bad this thing really was.  We knew that his cough wasn’t normal, but we had enough false alarms to know that not-every-terrible noise coming from Jonah translated into a negative situation. 

After a little while listening to him breathe and cough and breathe again, we realized we had no idea what was wrong with him.  We were clueless.  We thought about everything from the common cold, to bronchitis, to lung cancer.  We didn’t know.  Since we were away from home, we didn’t have a doctor and we were helpless.  And in between all of our conversations, we heard the barking of our little boy.

By the time I had gotten Jonah to fall back asleep, Sunday had made about 57 phone calls and lined up a doctor’s appointment for Jonah that afternoon. 

By the time we got to the doctor’s office, we were worn out with the worrying and the listening to his coughing and just wondering what was wrong with our son.  Both Sunday and I looked much worse than Jonah, and he was about to show us how good a little boy he can be.

The doctor walked into the room, introduced himself, and took Jonah into his arms.  He listened.  We were silent.  Jonah barked.  He listened. 

“Sounds like he has the croup.”

We didn’t want him to be sick, and to our ears the croup sounded much worse than the cold or lung cancer.  The croup sounded like some medieval torture device that uses a system of weights and pullies to slowly pull out nose hairs one by one.

“Beware of the awful power of the croup!  Ye shall never have furry nostrils again!”

Anyway, the doctor explained that the croup wasn’t that big a deal, as long as the medication is used.  He said that Jonah should be ok in a few days.  Then Jonah barked.  We all felt terrible.  We didn’t want him to go through all that garbage and we thought he was feeling terrible like we were feeling. 

We were wrong.  As we began our most intense feelings of angst over our sick child, Jonah happened to look up at me and smile. 

I couldn’t believe how great he was acting. 

Then he barked. 

Eating Solid Food

This was a large step for all of us.  At the sixth month, we took Jonah to the doctor’s office and he gave the ok to give Jonah something other than formula.  For some strange reason, we were fired up about this.  It was like the doctor had told us we could now collect $25 with every diaper we changed or something.  Or that we were guaranteed free college for Jonah or that we could all immediately go out for a steak dinner.   We couldn’t control ourselves, mostly because we had no idea what was ahead.

We did know that feeding him more “solid” food translated into more work and more mess, but we didn’t care.  

We just knew it was more!

We were elated that we could now feed Jonah rice cereal at 6:30am.   And then we could switch to oatmeal.  And then to green beans to squash to sweet potatoes and then to carrots.  Yes, Carrots!  And then, the big time.  Yep, we knew that fruit was on the menu and that Jonah was our main customer.  WE COULD NOT WAIT.  We had lost our ever-lovin’ minds.  We had no clue!

The first morning that Jonah was going to dine on rice cereal, I was up about twenty minutes ahead, reading the directions on the rice cereal box like I was responsible for constructing an H-Bomb or something. 

I was focused. 

I was ready. 

I was clueless.

About the time I had the bottle and the rice cereal mixed and ready to go, I heard Jonah’s little grunt from the other room.  He was ready, too. 

I decided to leave his pajamas on because I thought that he’d be cold when I fed him.  I was thrilled because I put him in the high chair for the first time and affixed the detachable tray with expectation.

As I began feeding him his bottle, I wondered how he was going to eat the food as well.  I didn’t know whether I should give him the bottle first, then the cereal, the cereal first then the bottle or an alternation of the two.  I hadn’t been where a baby had his first bite of real food, so I was in the dark. 

I made it up as I went along.  Like most people, I thought God made airplanes so that mothers and fathers could do the “airplane” thing with the food.  I gave it a try.  I made the sound, moved the spoon full of rice cereal around in an airplane motion, and moved the spoon toward his mouth. 

He was excited, he was motivated, and he was moving when I tried to feed him.   The spoon got to his mouth just in time for Jonah to move his head.  My first attempt at feeding Jonah real food resulted in an ear full of rice cereal.  

Just because I just spackled Jonah’s ear shut did not mean I was disappointed.  Sure, I could have done it better, but this was our first time.  So I tried it again.  This time, my effort resulted in Jonah snorting a little rice cereal.  I tried it again.  In the hairline.  I tried it again.  Inside his pajamas.  I tried it again.  In his armpit.  I tried it again.  Between his toes. 

So, I tried another method.  I like to call it the bottle-and-stuff method of eating.  Here’s how it goes:  I start Jonah off on the bottle and then quickly take it out of his mouth with my left hand when he begins a good rhythm.  With my right hand, I would stuff a spoon full of rice cereal in his mouth. 

The stuffing is the most important part, requiring the correct force with the correct level of infiltration.  In other words, I needed to gauge how hard I was going to stick the spoon into his open trap while noting how far in the spoon would go.  If I didn’t put it in enough, Jonah wouldn’t eat it.  If I stuck the spoon too far into the mouth, he would gag.  Either way, my boy was going to eat about half of what I prepared. 

Which brings me to a few revelations:

#1:       The boy needs to eat naked from now on.  (If not fully naked, a diaper is the most he should wear).  That first time, I left his pajamas on, and he came out looking like a furry rice ball.  It got all over. 

#2:       Bath time comes after feeding.  Although he could get messy with the bottle, the real food caused minor explosions of food to fly all over.  He didn’t so much eat it as drool it.  Bathing Jonah after he eats is like showering after painting a room—you find paint on body parts that you never thought you’d have paint on.

#3:       This food isn’t really solid food.  I’d never really looked at baby food, but I noticed that no chewing is required.  That’s good, because home-boy only has gums at the moment and those don’t really help with barbecued chicken breast.

#4:       Just because it’s on his face does not mean that I can’t scrape it off and put it back in his mouth.  Same goes for food on his chest, arms and in his belly button.  Waste not, want not.  I had times where I was done with the baby food jar, but I still scraped four or five spoonfuls off of his torso.

At this rate, I needed Jonah’s skin to be able to absorb the rice cereal like a Brazilian tree frog because his mouth was not cooperating.  Jonah was not interested in eating this stuff. 

It wasn’t the bottle or the boob, so he didn’t care about it. 

Bathing Together

My mother painted a picture that still hangs on their bathroom wall.  It reads, “Save water; bathe with a friend.”  While I can question the ethics of such a painting—bathing in multiples conveys a moral flexibility not often found in a Christian home—the message itself was practiced for a limited time in our the Towles household.

Our house changed significantly throughout our time growing up.  It started as a nursery, housing a baby for six or seven years, then as a playroom for about a decade, then as a dormitory for migratory teenagers, then a crash pad for college students.  Even now, my parents’ home converts itself into a hotel during holidays or family get-togethers. 

While we were in the playroom phase of the home, my parents got creative with how we were cleaned up, hosed off or deloused.  We were boys, so we transitioned back and forth between three stages: filthy, dripping from the bath, or on our way to being filthy again.  If you have only raised girls or you have grown up around girls, you may not understand the depth of filth I am talking about.  It’s the kind of dirty that often required a “prewash” hosedown in the backyard, sans and shirts, and then a dip in the tub.   This kind of dirtiness required flexibility usually reserved for a general in a war zone or a kindergarten teacher or an acrobat in circe du soleil.  My parents had to understand what would get us clean and keep us clean, at least while we were close enough for us to touch them.  (Being that filthy, many times we’d stick to them if we were not clean enough, mainly because dirt, juice residue and grape jelly form a very strong mastic.  This is dangerous stuff if you like being clean and physically separated from those who are not clean.)

In order to have time other than bathing, my parents devised a plan to reduce bath time without a reduction in cleanliness:  multiple bathers.  Yep, they threw us all in at once.  Great plan.

As my Dad tells it, this multiple bathers idea really took off around the time I could sit up in the bath with my older brother, Joe.  I could sit up in the bath and Joe was about the age where bathing was a play time, so Joe would play “lets-see-how-long-little-brother-can-hold-his-breath,” which explains my short-term memory problem. 

Actually, my parents were there supervising, but that didn’t mean that problems didn’t arise.  Picture the scene.  There, in the quiet of the evening, with the problems of the day behind the Towles family and the moment of rest and slumber ahead of them, they would gather in the bathroom for the night-time scrubdown and bed time.  Mom and Dad would strip us down and place us in the warm communal waters of brotherhood.   With toys and washcloths and soap, they commenced bathing, but they neglected to tell us filthy little boys that our purpose in the tub was to reverse our filthy state, to scrub us clean, to make us less malodorous.  We didn’t get it.

We thought bath time was fun time, where we splashed and threw toys, or we thought it was torture time where brother Joe played the aforementioned “underwater” game, or we thought it was potty time.  Yes, you read that correctly.  I would love to blame the brown submarines that often accompanied our communal tub time on my brother Joe, but I know that I was the creator of those floaties. 

At this stage of fatherhood, I reflect on the communal tub scene with a bit of confusion.  Before I became a father, I just thought it was a funny I-soiled-the-tub-I-shared-with-Joe story.  It was humorous, that satisfied grin stretched on my face as Joe tried to avoid my creation as it sped toward him in the ever-shrinking tub. 

As a parent, I am confused that they still tried it after the first time I added my own efforts to “tub time.”  Why would they keep on taking that risk?  Why did they put us in the tub together again, repeatedly? 

It just presented a potential for much more work than two boys being bathed separately.  It required a massive cleanup effort:  the tub, then Joe, then me, then my Mom or Dad, depending on who cleaned the tub.  

It didn’t seem like a good idea, but communal tubbing revealed a massive secret of parenthood:  when it’s your idea, you tend to hang onto it longer than if someone told you about it.  That’s the issue with parenting:  it makes you an expert, even though you’re clueless.  My parents didn’t know what the heck they were doing, but we kids depended on them to hose off the stale applejuice and peanut butter.

Fortunately, the time for communal bathing came to an end, mostly because Joe could remember that I had a penchant for using the tub as a toilet, and they realized that the time of usefulness for communal bathing had come to an end.  (Joe would pitch a fit when they’d dunk me in beside him.)  My parents’ recognition that their good idea (communal bathing) was not a permanently good idea showcases a great principle of parenting:  change is inevitable. 

They recognized that getting us both in the tub was going to get more difficult and that getting us out was going to get easier.  Joe knew that I was going to befoul the tub at some point, and there was a distinct possibility that I would learn that spoiling the bath time triggered an abrupt exit.  (It’s fun to get a quick, loud, excited reaction from Mom and Dad, so why not?)

So when the usefulness of the effort has run its course, it’s good to recognize the change and never to look back.  In other words, when there’s a turd in the tub, it’s time to get out.

Apple Juice and Gorilla Grunts

Drinking Apple Juice 

We attempted to give Jonah apple juice as a remedy for his constipation, but we had a slight bump in the road when it came to apple juice.  For some reason, Jonah wasn’t cool with the whole switch to the fruity beverage.  In fact, some would argue that my man didn’t like apple juice. 

To counteract his aversion, I tried different methods.

I tried feeding him apple juice before feeding him anything else in the morning.  His reaction, while strange, was nonetheless negative.  He was whimpering a little because he hadn’t eaten all night, but I didn’t think he was all that hungry.  When he began on the apple juice, expecting the regular formula, all was ok until he began tasting it, halfway to finishing the bottle.  All of a sudden, the contented look on his face changed to one of shock and downright outrage.  My man was angry.  Someone had taken his life source, nay, his very soul and replaced it with a sugary sweet version of his heavenly elixir.  In an instant, Jonah was mad and he wasn’t going to take it anymore.  

Yet, he calmly, clearly maintained his power position in the relationship by looking at me with the “what-in-thee-world-are-you-thinking-Dad” look on his face;

or was it the “am-I-in-the-correct-apartment?” look on his face;

or was it the “have you-lost-your-daggone-mind” look on his face. 

At any rate, he was nonplussed for having apple juice in the morning.

So I tried it about an hour after he ate, but he doesn’t want any of it.  Not a bit.  He sticks his tongue out and puts up a huge block for the bottle.  He’s recognized that this liquid is not the formula and apple juice is not his thing.  This time, however, he dispenses with the particulars of polite conversation and lets out a bellow that cracked the foundation of our apartment. 

Translation for this scream:  “NO, not this stuff again!  It tastes like.  I don’t know.  How can I form a simile without the requisite numbers of taste options!” 

Another translation:  “It looks like pee!  It looks like pee!” 

Another translation:  “I hate sweet things.  IhateumIhateumIhateum.” 

He Makes Strange Noises

Jonah’s major form of communication can be broken down into four neat categories:  smiling, laughing, screaming, and strange noises.  The first two forms of communication, smiling and laughing, charm everyone from Jonah’s parents to the complete stranger.  He’s a brilliant schmoozer who cannot resist “working the room.” 

The other two, however, are not so endearing.  At this point in his life, Jonah only screams on three occasions:  when he’s tired, when he’s extremely hungry, and when he feels like screaming.  When he feels like screaming, Jonah lets out a yell that rivals most every other form of yell, from the heavy metal brand of yelling to the more common “Rebel Yell.”  I sometimes feel like I am raising the future lead singer of Aerosmith.  (Yep, they’ll still be touring when Jonah gets old enough).  His yell sounds like someone has felt the Holy Ghost while simultaneously being shot.  (Just imagine a television evangelist getting a cap busted in him.  That’s what it sounds like).    He doesn’t have to be in a bad mood or in a good mood.  I truly believe Jonah screams just to break the monotony of his young life.

His noises, however, present a more entertaining side of Jonah.  He has developed quite a repertoire.  Here they are.

The Dolphin:  Here, he opens his mouth widely and makes an Ack-Ack-Ack-Ack noise like a dolphin makes.  From time to time, I feel for the dorsal fin, just in case he develops a leaking blow hole. 

The Fog Horn:  This one comes on when he is a little drowsy.  His face gets a bluesy look to it, with his eyes slit and his mouth puckered, and he makes a haunting OooooOOOOoooo, just like a fog horn.  I try to imagine Jonah getting a job on the North Carolina coast somewhere, acting as a human safety measure for all boats entering the waters near Outer Banks.  He could be a life saver!

 The Silver Backed Gorilla:  Sometimes, when Jonah gets particularly excited over a toy or something on the floor—think Extended Reaching Position—he attempts to convince the item to come to him by creating a deep-throated sound that “punches” the air.  OOO.  OOO.  OOO.  It sounds a lot like a gorilla.  I wonder if he picked up something while he visited the zoo in Louisville…

The Haunting Moan:  The last one is a mixture of one of the other three noises, combined with exhaustion.  Jonah makes this noise because he attempts the Dolphin, the Fog Horn, or the Silver Backed Gorilla while he goes to sleep.   I can’t really transliterate the sound he makes, but it is one of the funniest noises ever made.  Just imagine a very small boy trying to imitate the noise of a very large gorilla, but in slow motion.   I usually stand by his crib and wait for this noise.  About a quarter of the time, I am rewarded with the Haunting Moan.