Rules

The story is told of three children whose mother mandated that coats were to be removed and laid across the table every day when they got home from school. She would then hang them up about an hour or so later.

One day, the children came home, took off their coats and laid them across the table. "Mom," one of them asked, "Why do we lay our coats across the table instead of hanging them up? Everyone else hangs their coats up when they get home, but we have to lay them on the table. Why?"

Mom said, "I don't know why...I guess it's because that's what we did when I was growing up and it's just a habit."

"Why did you do it when you were little? We don't want to do it anymore."

"Well," mom began. "I suppose I could ask mother about this. She'd know why we did it." So she rang up her mother and asked her about it.

"Mama, why did we have to always remove our coats and lay them on the kitchen table when we got home from school?" There was a long silence and Mama replied, "It's because that was the rule when we were growing up, so I did it with you because I thought that it was a good way to do things."

Mom asked, "Do you have any idea why Gramma asked you to do that?"

"I don't know," Mama replied. "But I can ask her. I don't know if she can remember why, but I can ask her." So the next visit to the convalescent hospital where Gramma lived, Mama asked her about the coat question.

"Mother, do you remember when we were children, and we came home from school--is there anything you recall about what you made us do then?"

Gramma thought about it for several minutes, her mind going back to the old country kitchen with the pot-bellied stove in one corner. "Oh yes. You used to go straight out and feed the chickens after school and Randolph practiced the piano."

"No Mother. I mean..." Maybe Mother wouldn't remember. "As soon as we got home you made us lay our coats across the kitchen table and you put them away later. Do you remember that?"

Recognition flickered across Gramma's face. "Oh yes. I remember that we did that for awhile."

"Didn't we do it all the time?" Mama asked. "Because Patsy has the kids doing it and they don't know why and I did it with Patsy and I never gave it a thought. But why did you have us do it?"

Gramma chuckled. "You had the kids do it? Oh good night!" She began laughing out loud. "Don't make them do that. Tell Patsy to stop it!" And again she laughed outright. "Oh Honey, there was an outbreak of head lice at the school. The teacher sent home a note to us saying to look through your scalps to see if there were any nits on your head. But I didn't want to embarrass you children with that. So instead, I asked you to lay your coats with the sheepskin collars, across the table with the collars near the stove. My thinking was that if you had head lice, the heat from the stove would drive them off the collars onto the black wool of the coat and I could see if you had lice that way." She laughed again, "For goodness sake, I think we can stop doing it now!"

Three generations of kids following through, now putting their coats on the table in the dining room, far away from a stove or heat. No lice would be seen on the white and pale blue polyester Columbia parkas the kids were wearing now. No. Those rules were for children in another era, living under different circumstances.

I tell this story here because we are all caught up doing things by habit, governed by rules set long ago: the rituals we have during the holidays, the way we speak to other people, what we say off the cuff to neighbors. It is the principle of old rules that we need to take with us and apply to today's life. The literal rule may have no meaning, and even be laughable in today's society. We have friends who are different than the ones who made the original rules, who treat us differently than the old relationships that we still react to. We are now adults with the skillset of grown up people, and capable of creating our own rules for how we behave. The old rules are not bad: they just need to be revised and reapplied. It's the principle that counts, not always the exact action that we see.