Robert Frost famously once said, “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” He’s been dead for quite a few years now, but if he were still around I think I’d have to look him up just to tell him that I found out what it is that doesn’t love a wall: a teenage boy.
Here’s what I want to know: have teenage boys always punched walls, or has this fad just come about since the invention of drywall? Because it’s hard for me to believe that there was quite as much wall punching going on in the days of lathe and plaster, let alone in the days of stone and mortar. And if there was, then I don’t see how teenage boys kept enough use of their hands to be able to engage in that other thing they like to do with their fists so much.
But what do I know? Maybe they did. Maybe teenage cave boys punched the hell out of their cave rooms—punched right through their Death Metal (well, Death Stone) posters and into limestone. And maybe teenage boys on the prairie punched right through their rough hewn planks and into the dirt of their sod houses. Maybe, even, that’s the real origin of the Three Little Pigs story: it wasn’t a Big Bad Wolf that huffed, and puffed and blew the houses down; it was an Extremely Pissed Teenager who raged and fumed and finally put his fist through the wall (all except for the brick one, of course.)
It’s hard for me to say, since I have never actually been a teenage boy, but I find it difficult to believe that all of these angry teenagers aren’t secretly running a stud finder over potential walls in the middle of the night, and then, when they find the areas that are safe, making tiny little marks to show themselves, and others, exactly where to punch. Kind of like the marks hobos would leave on the doorsteps of homes it was safe to beg at.
However, even though I’ve never been a teenage boy, as luck would have it I am married to a former one, and he assures me that this is not the case: when you are in a “wall punching state of mind” your mind is not clear enough to look for the softest area to land your fist. You just need to punch. “You wouldn’t understand,” he tells me.
What? Oh, I understand the urge to punch—and bite, kick, scratch and gouge. What I don’t understand is the urge to do these things to someone (or something) that hasn’t annoyed me. Don’t get me wrong: there are plenty of things that annoy me. A wall just doesn’t happen to be one of them.
Ceilings I can understand. Who wouldn’t want to punch a ceiling? I mean, just think about the way they are always producing cobwebs in the blink of an eye, hiding them in plain sight until that perfect moment when someone you want to impress walks into your (supposedly) clean house, whereupon they unspool them in long, dusty strings directly in that person’s line of sight.
And floors are just as bad. The way they lay there, encouraging both children and humans to pile things onto their invitingly flat surfaces. If they had a little more compassion they would repel clothes and toys like magnets with matching poles, instead of staring up at them seductively and saying, “Oh, go on. Just throw that down right here, honey. I’ll take care of it.”
But walls? I like walls: not only do they keep annoying people away from me, but unlike doors they aren’t wishy-washy about it—they keep them out all of the time. Which, come to think about it, might be why teenage boys don’t like them.
And why I do.