Kick the Football

Charlie Brown, home projects & inevitable failure

Photo by Ben Hershey on Unsplash

Chapter 1

You know how Charlie Brown never gets to kick that football? You know how Lucy always pulls it away at just the last second? You know how ol’ Chuck ends up flat on his back and yelling every single time?

ARGH!!

He never catches a break. Try as he might—and he does, again and again—he always winds up on his back, gazing up and into an unkind sky and even less kind face. His suspicions are always confirmed.

“I’m gonna come running, and you’re gonna pull that football away, and I’ll wind up flat on my back like always.”

“But I have this signed document,” Lucy tells him on Halloween. “But it’s a national holiday tradition,” Lucy tells him on Thanksgiving. On and on it goes.

And Charlie Brown wonders: Maybe this is the time. Maybe this is the moment. Maybe this is the day I’ll kick that football clear to the moon!

But it’s not, and he doesn’t. Lucy does what she always does, conjuring a clever excuse: “Funny thing about this document—it was never notarized.” Or, “Isn’t it funny how some traditions just fade away?” And so on.

And we watch and we chuckle and we wonder: Why doesn’t Charlie Brown learn? Why doesn’t he change? Why does he bother trying to kick that pigskin at all?

Chapter 2

The screws fell off our mailbox a few weeks ago leaving the metallic black door hanging precariously. I can only imagine what the mail carriers thought.

The thing is old and rusted and poorly painted and never even had a flag—I had to purchase a stick-on one when we moved in. But I left it that way because the flow of mail had continued uninterrupted. Why mess with a good thing? But this dangling mailbox door was about to force my hand.

I scoured the landscaping around that old mailbox—digging through the mulch and the lamb’s-ear and the river rocks—but couldn’t find those wayward screws or bolts or nuts. I ventured to the basement, convinced I must have something useful in those tool bench drawers, but soon discovered I had nothing near appropriate to return my mailbox to working order.

And again, I thought of the mail carriers. What must they think of us?

Perhaps it was time for a new mailbox.

Off to Home Depot, to the mailbox aisle where I studiously examined each of the wares on display. I chose one, convinced it had all the necessary hardware included, returned to my home, discovered rather quickly it included none of the necessary hardware, ordered said hardware on Amazon and waited.

The hardware arrived, the box was opened, and I dismantled what I soon discovered was a rather jerry-rigged mailbox out on my front porch. One rusted screw after the next fell to the ground, and I yanked the old block of wood from the post that had apparently been holding the whole thing together. The door of the old mailbox still swung precariously as I set the battered thing to the side.

Glad I won’t have to reassemble this, I thought. What a mess.

A task I expected to last twenty minutes was going on multiple days, but the end was in sight. And I—a stranger to home improvement project success—was about to clock a win.

And then.

The new mailbox was too big, didn’t quite fit in the space, and the now-acquired necessary hardware didn’t fit correctly on the immovable post. My drill stubbornly refused to drive the new and decidedly not rusted screws into place, which left me to jerry-rig the new mailbox in much the same way the old one had been, only demonstrably worse. Rather than being held in place by eight rusted screws and an old block of wood, this new one swung wildly on the post, cocky in its freedom and mocking my inability to properly insert more than two screws.

This wasn’t going to cut it. The mail carriers would think I’d lost my mind.

So, down came the new mailboxes, up went the old one—rusted screws, block of wood and a stream of bitter curses—and I wound up doing what I should’ve done in the first place: find a bolt and nut to secure the original mailbox door.

Did I mention how much I suck at these kinds of projects?

Chapter 3

My family is relatively patient with my home improvement rage. They humor my efforts to try and hang drapes and repair drywall and the like. They know how things will likely turn out. They give me some space when things inevitably go wrong. They know to cover their ears.

My youngest daughter calls the words that tumble from my lips “sandpaper words;” they grate on the ear in a rather uncharitable way. I imagine that sandpaper running up and down exposed skin, chafing away, driving discomfort, making us squirm and itch and shrink back. Kind of like failure.

And it’s on me, really. I know this isn’t my strong suit—home improvement projects and the like. Good on me for trying, I suppose. Good on me for trying to disrupt life’s patterns, to push against the odds of success. But I should know by now—and in fact, I remind myself just a bit too late each time—that I’m probably going to screw it up. I need to be patient with and kind to myself so as to be patient and kind to others.

It’s not so much about trying as it is about recovering. It’s not so much about showing up as it is about dealing with the aftermath of unintended failure.

Epilogue

We laugh at Charlie Brown because he never learns. Just don’t kick the football, dude. Just walk away. But he persists, blockhead that he is. And he winds up on his back.

And I can’t help but think: Good on him for trying. But—my man—take the next step. You know there’s a pretty good likelihood you’re gonna end up flat on your back. Don’t just lay there and yell. Don’t just curse the world and its inevitable injustice. You can only change your own response.

Maybe Lucy wouldn’t be so eager to pull that football away if she knew Charlie Brown would laugh it off. Maybe she wouldn’t be so insistent on continuing the con if she knew Charlie Brown considered himself in on the joke.

Maybe my own home improvement projects would be better if I budgeted in the likely period of failure, if I painted those moments with laughter and eyerolls rather than sandpaper words and rage.

Maybe we need to expect setbacks to be interwoven within our hard-won tapestry of progress. Maybe in so doing, we’ll give ourselves more grace—and find that that grace then overflows and affects others. And maybe then we’ll get back up and keep at it.  

And another thing:

• A lot has been written in the wake of Tuesday’s election results, but I found

  Pete Davis
  ’s reflections “Out beyond hope” to be one of the best. It’s both inspiring and concrete in practical steps. I invite you to give it a read.

• This week’s “Now Discern This” straddled an odd moment in time: I wrote it Monday knowing folks wouldn’t read it until Wednesday. I invite you to give that a read, too: “A Reflection After the Election.”