The Darker Side of the Greatest Event on Earth

When you were a kid, did your parents ever have company? Mine did, and my mom was always so insistent on the house being spotless for them. I never understood it. Why is the goal when you bring other people around to make your house looks like no one lives there? So generally I would clean for about five minutes, wait until she walked out of the room to deal with something else, then shovel my mess under my bed. Efficient, effective, and over. I still don’t understand it to this day. In South Africa this summer I got a flashback of my own experience doing that. It was if South Africa decided they didn’t want the world to see their mess, so they shoveled it under their bed. Yet one of the moments that is most vivid in my mind still brings me back to the spot where I saw a glimpse of South Africa’s mess.