“If you’re painting the wall,” he’d say, “don’t miss a corner and
call it good enough. No sir, if you’re going to do something, do it
right.” He said the same thing about homework, about oil changes,
whatever.

Dad did an adequate job raising me into an adequate man, and if he
was still here I’d say thank you, sincerely. But I don’t think he really
took his mantra to heart.

♦ ♦ ♦

I don’t know why anyone would want a door, that closes and latches, between the kitchen and the
living room. Our house had a door there, which was always inconvenient for carrying food from the kitchen, or groceries into the kitchen. You’d need to leave the door open while you’re cooking, or put
your food down and turn the knob.

When I was ten or twelve, dear old dad decided to the door had annoyed him for too many years, so he replaced it with a double-swinging door, so from either direction we could rump-bump
the door open. He bought the door and supplies, probably checked out a
how-to book from the library, and spent an afternoon with his drill and
tools taking the old door down, hanging that new door, and hooray, we could finally carry a TV
dinner into the TV room, without twisting a doorknob.

But . . . the bottom of the door brushed against the living room
carpet, just a little. Whenever anyone emerged from the kitchen, you
could hear a very faint ‘whoosh’.

“If you’re hanging a door,” I often thought after that, “hang it
right,” but Dad hadn’t. Maybe he was tuckered from all the work, or maybe it just seemed like too much bother to
fix such a tiny annoyance, so he never did.
And hey, I lived there too, and never tried to
fix it. All of us settle for less than a perfect world, and everyone in the family grew accustomed to that door whoosh-whooshing, as it  slowly
trimmed a triangle into the carpet.

♦ ♦ ♦

Years later, after my father was dead and buried, Mom moved out of the big, empty house and into an
apartment. She wanted to fix up the old place, to maybe sell it or rent it out. She hired people to do most of the work, but she asked me to re-hang or replace that
swinging door.It sounded like a lot of work, so I balked.

“Why don’t I just take the door down?” I said. “Nobody needs a door
there.” Mom agreed, and taking it down only involved a few minutes with a
screwdriver. We gave the door to Habitat for Humanity.And now, the strangers who live in the house where I grew up have unobstructed passage between the kitchen and the living room.
There’s no doorknob, no door, and no whoosh.This is the wisdom of my
father, carried to the next generation: “If you’re going to do
something, do it right,” he always said. I didn’t want to do it right, and didn’t want to do it at all, so I didn’t. Thanks, Dad.7/13/2020   
Republished: 3/12/2024