Hold, please

Mayor John Moak reminds me of my mother.

He wants everything done, and he wants it done quickly - never mind how sloppy it is.

My mother is like that.

I remember when I was a kid, my mother always complaining about how deliberate and "slow" my dad was about doing things such as wallpapering a bathroom.

She would go in and slap the wallpaper up and he would make sure the pattern was lined up from strip to strip, the light switch plates lined integrated into the pattern ... well, you get the picture.

When my dad did the wallpapering, it looked really nice and stayed put. When my mother did it, it looked sloppy and sometimes it fell off the wall after a while.

He took several hours to wallpaper the bathroom and she took maybe one hour.

And it was the same with cleaning the stove, traditionally his duty. He would practically take it apart to clean it ... since they separated, the stove is ... well, it's not as sparkly as it used to be (it's stainless steel).

This divergence in methodology was a constant source of bickering between them (among other things).

So I can kind of understand from personal experience Moak's rush to do things - close the landfill while "dealing with the devil," so to speak, solar panels on middle schools with questionable roofs, re-configuring old school buildings ... and yeah, wrapping up the PI water/sewer project in haste because the city needed those betterments to start paying off loans.

My mother's pride in being able to do things "quickly" was/is immense, but she never looked at the consequences of her haste, and thus did not use it to make a judgment about the next task at hand.

But .... sometimes Mom's slap-dash approach worked to an advantage ... and Dad's measured deliberation was sometimes unnecessary.

You reap what you sow ... boy, could I tell you stories about planting the garden every year ... but I think perhaps the mayor needs to tamp down his nature a bit and slow the heck down.

He should become a parental unit - an amalgam of my parents, if you will.

This isn't wallpapering we're talking about here.