There is a story about Thomas Edison and Henry Ford that involves the two great inventors spending the day together at the 1915 San Francisco World’s Fair. It seems that, after walking around and looking at the exhibits for nearly eight hours, they both realized at approximately the same time that they had promised to meet their wives for tea much earlier. This event, which was reported in the local papers, was looked upon with benevolent amusement by all—with the possible exception of their wives—as just another example of the quirky workings of two great minds.
Surely, the thinking went at the time, two such great men shouldn’t have to bother with trivial things like remembering what time they promised to meet their wives for tea. They had already given us electric light and affordable cars—what more could we possibly expect from them?
I was thinking of this story the other day when I came home from work to find my kitchen in its usual chaotic state, with the fridge door gaping open, the milk jug sitting on the counter, and the lid on the floor. Next to the milk, providing more than a little clue as to why it was out, was a trail of cereal leading all along the counter and back to the cabinet, where a box of the same cereal lay tipped over on its side, more cereal spilling out onto the floor. The whole thing had the air of a brutal breakfast crime scene (one where the cereal was the intended victim and the milk simply an unfortunate witness), but of course, having seen this same scene many times before, I realized it was neither: instead, it was simply the remains of Clementine’s breakfast.
You might wonder, reading this, why we tolerate such slovenliness in our house—you might even assume, given the magnitude of the mess, that we encourage it—but I assure you that the answer to both is the same: we don’t. Believe me: as many times as we have come home to this terrible scene we have chastised Clementine about it. But no matter how upset we get, or what we threaten her with, in the end her answer is always a variation of the same theme: “I’m not like you: I have better things to think about than making sure all of the cereal is off of the floor.”
She always says this so dramatically, and in such a please-don’t-bore-me-with-your-bourgeois-sensibilities tone, that I can’t help but be reminded of the pair of errant inventors, sacrificing their amicable marital relationships in order to bring us cruise control and the electric chair. And I can’t help but wonder what invention of equal importance Clementine must be working on to justify turning my kitchen into a cereal wasteland every morning.
Who knows? Perhaps she is working on how to make a blacker form of black. Or perhaps she is mapping out the location of the lost eyeliner mines of the Incas. Or perhaps she is even pondering what must surely be the greatest teenage conundrum of all time: why are my parents always on my case about stupid stuff like homework and cereal?
Of course, perhaps I am maligning her. Perhaps what she is really thinking about is the cereal; perhaps all this time she actually has been working on the problem of how to get the cereal out of the box and into the bowl without spilling it on the floor, and these daily trails are just proof of the failure of yet another one of her Rube Goldberg-like inventions.
It could be happening that way. After all, wasn’t it Edison who said, “I have not failed; I have just found ten thousand ways that don’t work”? Which means, at that rate, I’ll only be cleaning up cereal for another thirteen years.