Rules

I never realized how attached to rules I am--until meeting a true iconoclast in Mike.  His motto: "No rules, Baby!"

As an English teacher, I wanted to instill a love for writing in my students--but the Powers That Be insisted on repeated tests for grammar proficiency.  I happen to like grammar, and knew it inside out because of diagramming sentences in seventh grade.

But in public education, I often felt strait-jacketed by the number of tests we had to give.  Year after year, in every grade, we were required to spend a portion of every class drilling students on rules of grammar--specifically targeted for the upcoming standardized tests.

When I was teaching college English, I spent my weekends grading papers.  I circled misspelled words, dangling modifiers, and comma splices, reminding them over and over of the rules they were intent on ignoring: Use objective case here; avoid ending sentences with prepositions; commas go inside quotation marks....

Even in my quasi-hippie days, I followed certain rules for eating.  First it was Adele Davis' system of eating tons of protein and no carbs; then it was macrobiotics--brown rice and seaweed and steamed vegetables, no meat.  We were true believers--until we weren't anymore.

Once, during our macrobiotic/vegetarian years, I visited a friend's house and had a baloney sandwich on white bread and it was a moment of heaven.  From time to time, I'd sneakily visit a burger barn with my children and let them have a taste of meat, or my daughter and I would buy a whole box of Brach's chocolate-covered peanuts and eat them in the car.

Whenever (by force of habit or history) I ask Mike what  I "should" do, he reminds me, "No rules, Baby.  Do whatever you like."

With the exception of not wearing seat belts unless he feels like it, Mike is a law-abiding guy.  He lives his life by principles, not rules.  If he hears of cruelty to children or animals, he's enraged. I told him about a skinny, hungry, abandoned cat in my neighborhood and he's planning to catch, feed, and worm the cat on his next trip here. He's indignant that someone would move away and leave a cat behind to fend for himself.

With Mike, I keep coming up against "rules" that I live by without questioning where they came from.  Some are so firmly installed in my psyche that I can still hear the voice in my head of the person who put them there--or the punishment for breaking them.

I remember a story in which a Southern novice cook advised all her friends to cut off the ends of the ham before cooking it.

When her friends asked why, she said,  "I don't know.  You just do it."  Soon, all her friends were cutting off the ends of their hams.

Finally, she asked her mother, "Why do we always cut off the ends of the ham?"

"Because," her mother said,  "My pan was too small to cook a full-sized ham."

Sometimes we doggedly follow rules that are unattached to logic--or because they are passed down from one generation to another long after anyone remembers why.  Sometimes the rules that fit us like winter coats as children are threadbare and need to go the way of all outgrown garments.


Albert Camus said, "Integrity has no need of rules."

Jim Morison said, "The body tries to tell the truth.  But, it's usually too battered with rules to be heard, and bound with pretenses that it can hardly move."

George Bernard Shaw wrote, "The golden rule is that there are no golden rules."

And Katharine Hepburn said, "If you obey all the rules you miss all the fun."