Most people have heard the paraphrased line from a poem by Robert Burns: “The best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry.” Gilbert and Sullivan incorporated this concept into their operettas, featuring storylines in which things are perfectly normal until they go “topsy-turvy”, that is, completely upside down. As an English teacher, I have seen this plot twist at the center of many stories, from Oedipus to No Country for Old Men. However, it is also something with which we are all painfully familiar in our daily lives. How many times have you planned something out to the letter—a surprise birthday party, a holiday dinner—only to have things go completely haywire? Given the ubiquity of unforeseen chaos in our lives, I want to share three stories to illustrate its operation, something to make us all laugh and ponder in this holiday season.
The first story comes from many years ago. My friend Jim took his family on a two-week trip to Italy. Two parents; three kids under 10. They spent the first week touring the countryside in a rented car, then checked into a pensione outside Florence, a charming little villa that lacked laundry facilities. So Jim tossed a week’s worth of dirty clothes in the car and found a nearby laundromat. It was closed but had a handwritten sign on the door that read: “Chiuso. Riaprirà tra una settimania da lunedì”. Recalling a distant college course in introductory Italian, Jim translated the note: “Closed. Will reopen on Monday”. Feeling he had found an easy solution to the laundry problem, Jim stuffed the clothes down a chute next to the front door. Unfortunately, what the note really said was: “Closed. Will reopen one week from Monday”. Topsy-turvy. What had begun as a perfectly reasonable plan was now the prospect of a family of five spending a week in a foreign country with no clothes. To his credit, Jim figured out a serviceable solution. He dropped a note with his home address and credit card number—in English—down the chute. Then he went and bought a bunch of athletic sweats (emblazoned with the logo of the Italian national soccer team) for his family. The ensuing week went fine; the family even got some thumbs up gestures from soccer fans. And Jim resolved to let his Italian remain untapped in the distant past where it belonged.
The second story comes from Pingry, 35 years ago. I was teaching American Literature; we were reading Thoreau’s famous protest piece, Civil Disobedience. In an effort to encourage students to see the essay in personal terms, I asked them to commit their own acts of civil disobedience. To help guide them, I recommended a few hypothetical (and relatively benign) examples, such as challenging a teacher’s assignment in class or missing a weekend curfew by a few minutes. I heard nothing for a week and figured things were OK. Then a student named Fred (not his real name) walked up to my table in the hall and handed me an unrecognizable chunk of metal. “What’s this?” I asked. “I’m not sure,” said Fred. “I pulled it off a bulldozer.” I asked why he would do that. He answered, “To disable it, of course”. He continued, “As a diehard environmentalist, I’m protesting a local construction project in my hometown. No deforestation in Maplewood this morning!” Topsy-turvy. While I admired that Fred had taken a stand (and Thoreau does insist that the protester break the law), I knew Fred had gone way too far, and by my prompting. I also knew that it was my responsibility to rectify the situation as best I could. Fred and I had a long conversation about common sense and boundaries; we also talked about what such a stunt might look like to a college admissions officer. I advised Fred to return the piece as quickly and surreptitiously as possible. He did so, and as far as I know, that closed out the incident. Fred went off to college and, I assume, a productive, law-abiding career. And me? I scrapped the personal journal requirement in American Literature, learning—the hard way—that some ideas are better in theory than they are in practice.
The third story goes all the way back to my distant childhood. My twin brother and I were around 10; that made my two younger brothers around seven and five. We were all hanging out at home when we noticed that our dog Shannon had a tick on his ear. In near-panic overreaction, all four boys ran to my mom and reported the “emergency”. Trying to calm us down and assess the situation, my mom—a nurse—got some rubbing alcohol, used a healthy amount to swab the dog’s affected ear, and tried to remove the tick with tweezers. It didn’t work. Meanwhile, her kids were growing increasingly hysterical. My youngest brother began to cry, and we all thought the dog was going to die. In the mounting chaos, my mom made a hasty and uncharacteristic error in judgment. Having heard somewhere that lighting a flame beneath an embedded tick will make it drop off, she held a butane lighter under the tick, struck the flint, and set the dog’s head on fire. Remember: lots of highly flammable rubbing alcohol. Topsy-turvy? I’m not sure the phrase quite captures what ensued: five crazed people screaming simultaneously and a dog taking off from the kitchen floor like a rocket leaving a launch pad. Fortunately, my dad rushed in from the next room, grabbed a nearby seat cushion, and quickly extinguished the flames. Incredibly, Shannon made a full recovery, although his permanently scorched ear required us to retell the saga every time we had new guests to the house. On a positive note, it eventually became one of those whacky stories that accumulate within families over the years, a shared experience that we all came to cherish (except Shannon) in its aftermath.
At the close of my most recent Flex essay (on celebrities at Tavern on the Green), I admitted that I wasn’t sure if the stories it relayed had any kind of moral or message. I feel the same way here. No one really needs to be reminded that life doesn’t always turn out as planned. And don’t forget: There are some days when absolutely everything you do seems to go wrong. In the face of life’s uncertainties, it seems both misguided and foolhardy to formulate some kind of strategy to ward off disaster. Proceed with caution, of course, but recognize that no matter what plans we put in place or precautions we take along the way, discord, and even catastrophe, will occasionally ensue. But look at the bright side. It may pour in the middle of your kid’s outdoor wedding; you may invite the wrong guests over for Thanksgiving dinner; and you may even set your beloved pet ablaze. Those topsy-turvy moments may put you through hell, but just think of the great stories you can tell in the years that follow.
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Author photo by Anthony "Truncs" Truncale '26
To contact the author: Mr. Keating