The Flood . . . I Lack It

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For a few summers in college I worked at Greenville Tech on the landscape crew. I worked for a guy named Willy who ran his crew like a well-oiled machine. As an aside, Willy was also a dyed in the wool audiophile. I don't know what he made as the lead landscaper at Greenville Tech but every spare penny of it must have gone into his audio system. He frequently had parties at his house so I'd stop by on my way to see my friends and on one of these stops, I was witness to his obsession. In a room lined with acoustic insulation was a single chair facing two huge ribbon speakers sitting beside a huge amp, preamp and the thickest audio cables I've ever seen.. The whole unit must have cost $50,000 if it cost a dollar. Anyway, he was a neat guy.

Back then I was the young guy on the crew and I had to work my way up the ranks. There was a clear pecking order in place and I was at the bottom of the list. I started out on RoundUp duty. It was my job to drive around with a 40 something woman named Polly, and go through backpack tank after backpack tank of Roundup in a fruitless effort to rid the campus of weeds. I eventually worked up to one of the more precise jobs available (weedeating) where Willy, the master weedeater, taught me how to perfect the art of cutting a straight-as-an-arrow edge walking backwards. It was sort of like The Karate Kid learning to wax-on, wax-off, only with a power tool.

I explain all of this because there was a guy on the Lawn Mowing crew named Ted who ran one of the large Toro lawn mowers whose personal mission in life appeared to be to stay ahead of the Weedeaters. And he liked to rub in the fact that he was always ahead of us, nevermind that he was sitting on a powered mower that he ran full out. So on our 10:15 and 2:45 breaks where we'd regroup at the motor pool and he'd always say "How much you lack?" As in, "How far behind me are you?" Most of the time the answer was, "Right behind you" but I always liked how that phrase sounded. "How much you lack?" It just sort of rolled off the tongue and it made good use of the word "lack". It's just fun to say. "Lack" Sadly, I moved on and now I'm a banker and no one says to me "How much you lack on that PowerPoint."

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Imagine my delight though when that word came back to me, 15 years later. I get to hear that word every single day. Well sort of. Mary Poole isn't actually saying "lack" but rather "like". It just sounds like "lack." Here's how it sounds in context. "Mmmm, nana . . . I lack it." (Mmm, banana. I like it.) Yes, people are "its" too. Mary Poole "lacks" lots of things. She lacks LuLu. Lacks Miss Lisa, her preschool teacher. Lacks popsicles. Her pronunciation is classic. It's sort of reminiscent of Carl from Slingblade when he says "I like em french fried pertatars."

Speaking of which, Mary Poole also lacks french fried pertaters:

  • Mary Poole: "Mary Poole nee nee (need) grapes. . . and french . . . fries."
  • LeeAnn: "You want french fries and grapes, Mary Poole?"
  • Mary Poole: *laughing* "Yeaaaah! *she pauses for a second, still smiling and thinking about the prospect of her lunch. . . I lack it."

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The Flood
So many things in life depend on perspective and there are few greater differences in perspective than those between grownups and children. Over the past 10 days Atlanta’s been saturated with water. It rained and rained and then it rained some more. And just when we needed some dry air and a break from the drizzle, we got a two hour downpour that finally did us in. Driving around a few hours after that downpour, it was like driving in a foreign land. People floating in canoes down neighborhood streets, bridges under water or inaccessible altogether, raging rivers where rivers shouldn’t be. To listen to the news, this is the worst flood in Atlanta in a generation or more.

With all the development that Atlanta’s undergone over the years the floods just keep getting worse and this one really capped it off. But this is all grown-up perspective. Kids are lucky this way because they don't really get the whole tragedy part of this situation. Mary Poole and Perritt didn’t get that it was anything other than a lot of fun. We saw epic flood, they saw only puddles. And rain. And rivers of water coming down the street.

When paired with some rain coats and rain boots, this was like a little slice of heaven. On seeing a temporary lake where our friends’ neighborhood streets and lawns should have been, LeeAnn and I were saddened. Mary Poole and Perritt let out a simultaneous “WOW!” After the waters had subsided the day after, all we heard as we went for a walk back over to that neighborhood was an eager Mary Poole repeating “I need see lake. . . I need see water. I like it.”

The bonus for them was that daddy needed to re-seed our embarrassingly burned up front yard, and so I was outside a lot in the rain with them, resulting in a lot of adult-supervised time outside in the drizzle. It’s hard to remember for most adults when rain was so much fun, but it’s certainly easy to see why kids can have fun. There’s all sort of stuff to do. Jump in puddles, make leaf boats, catch some rain in your mouth, run around in circles until you fall down and skin your knees because your boots are sort of clunky and you’re not used to them.

So that last part was sort of a downer, but two Hello Kitty Band-Aids later, and Mary Poole was back at it. It’s easy for us to remember how awful rain can be sometimes, especially when your good friends have 3 feet of water in their living room, but it’s a good thing to remember that there’s always a bright side. Even if it’s only as short-lived as the rain.