The Inconvenient Youth

MAXWELL Blah, Blah, Blah!  All of us have heard this cry from our parental units at one time or another.


It is that moment when they have tried to give you the space to succeed on your own, tried to allow you to make the right choices for yourself, and held their tongue for as long as they could.  This is the moment when your full given name, in it's entirety is uttered with gusto, as an attention getting mechanism, usually followed by something along the lines of....

"What were you thinking!?"
"Hello!  Are you listening to me?"
"That's it!  I have had enough!"
"Damien Omen has nothin' on you kiddo!"
"Up to your room!  NOW!  MARCH!"

I was always told to march by my parents.  What is up with that?  Why March?  Why not run, move it, GO!, hustle, scramble, fly, bustle, bolt, hasten, flit, leg it, or make tracks?  Why march?  That just doesn't say to me, "move quickly because your life is in danger".  It says that you are in basic training and they want you to move in a particular direction at a predetermined pace.  Maybe it is meant to evoke the idea of military rule and define the parents as the 4 star generals who will command all.  Maybe it is suppose to make the child think about dictators who rule their lands with military might and all the fear that it conveys.  Who can say?

C013674 Florida State Library Archives

Anyhoo, Max has gotten plenty of this from me lately.  I will say that I have never told him to march.  I choose to use ranch hand lingo..."Git!",  I find that as I herd him up the stairs the "Git" becomes very appropriate.  "Go on now.  Git! Git! Go to your room!"

What was I talking about?  Oh yea.  So I have started to refer to Max as Max..Max..Max.  That is about how many times, give or take, that you must say his name with authority to actually solicit a response, which is usually a frustrated "What, what, what!?"  Like he was surprised that you were being so obnoxious in your attempt to get his attention.  This always makes me laugh a bit because we use to call my middle brother  Mike..Mike..Mike.  It actually got to where we would just generally refer to him that way. 
"Yea, I am meeting Mike..Mike..Mike for dinner." 
Max..Max..Max is actually very much like Mike..Mike..Mike in some ways.

This is Mike..Mike..Mike

Mike is smart, he is a mechanical engineer after all.  Max is smart and has a great sense of humor.   Mike is pretty funny himself, as evidenced by his love of Pez dispensers.  I swear, he knows everything about them.  Mike..Mike..Mike took everything apart when he was a kid, radios, TVs, plant racks, my downhill skis(another story) and often fashioned them into some sort of device that could rid the world of various evils or invariably accidently rid the world of those pesky limbs or sensory organs.  Max..Max..Max also enjoys deconstruction projects that turn into "inventions".  Mike is very creative and so is Max.  Intelligence regarding logic and yet a flair for the creative, this is what they share.  The greatest similarity may lie within the realm of their interior lives, each with the ability to be creatively analytical inside their own heads and therefore, they require the additional "knocking" if you will, to get their attention.

Mike..Mike..Mike has grown out of this name, most of the time, but Max..Max..Max is just growing into it.  I thought for a moment that maybe I should worry about this lack of attention.  Then I would recall that my brother Mike turned out pretty good, I guess I have nothing to worry about.  Whew!  Love ya Mikey!

 Max..Max..Max is reminiscent for me in a fun way.  I get to be reminded of my childhood with my brothers (I'll tell you about it sometime) and then simultaneously  experience the pleasure and frustration of an inconvenient youth, who disrupts my world and makes me think and reason why on a constant basis.  My toes have carpal tunnel from all of the "keeping on" them that I have had to do since Max..Max..Max appeared.  Beside all of the character that I have had the opportunity to create for myself over the last 6 years, I also have some wicked calf muscles.

Please always remember and don't ever forget:

"What lies behind us and what lies ahead of us are tiny matters compared to what lives within us."


Henry David Thoreau