Quick Pick-up

I’m not sure how my parents managed to raise six children in a busy Rodgers Forge townhouse. Somehow, daily life seemed to click along smoothly enough.

From a child’s perspective, our house was always in fine shape, even if a steady stream of toys crept up from the basement and took over the entire first floor. My mother seemed to be generally fine with the toy situation – as long as company wasn’t coming. In that case, we spent hours straightening, vacuuming, dusting and polishing the furniture. The house had to be presentable for visitors.

Sometimes, though, my mother didn’t know that someone was coming. We would be enjoying a perfectly ordinary afternoon, when suddenly the phone would ring.

“What’s that?” my mother would say, sounding absolutely delighted. “You’ll be stopping by in 10 minutes?”

Then she would hang up and call out the dreaded acronym of all acronyms: “Q-P-U!”

It was then we knew. Someone was coming to visit – and the house needed to be ready. Our household would spring immediately into action.

QPU stood for “quick pick-up,” and it was part of the family vocabulary. When the QPU call came down, you dropped whatever you were doing. You stopped and grabbed anything in sight and hid it – sliding shoes under the couch, tossing toys into the hall closet and filling laundry baskets with anything on the floor and sprinting upstairs to make sure they were concealed.

We weren’t a regimented family in any other way, but we took the QPU order extremely seriously. I don’t recall that anyone was ever caught shirking. It wouldn’t have happened. A QPU was a battle call, as we tackled the clean-up of the house with as much speed as possible. So much was at stake.

Looking back on it, I wonder sometimes why it was such a big deal. The person arriving was almost always a wonderful friend or relative who would have been completely understanding of the waist-high castle we were building out of blocks or the winding path of book covers we were using as stepping-stones to get between the couch and the dining room. They might even have been impressed with the 379 baseball cards my brothers were analyzing on the floor.

But in the moment, I never questioned it. I embraced the adrenaline rush and got a thrill out of launching into the frenzied teamwork with my siblings. I’m sure I beamed with pride as my mother opened the door minutes later to welcome a guest to an uncluttered living room.

Of course, the house was not always cleaner after a QPU, but it looked cleaner. And that was the goal. We had to be ready to throw open the front door and welcome people inside without worrying that they would find toys and clutter everywhere. And it worked – every time.

As we begin a new year, we can easily commit to a long list of new year’s resolutions, none of which will stick or have a real impact. Or perhaps we can pick one endeavor, a fairly simple one, that doesn’t take long. Maybe it’s as easy as finding a little extra time for you, for God, for someone you love. Maybe there’s an area of your life that could use the equivalent of a quick pick-up of its own.

Sometimes we are seeking transformation when what we really need is more gentle growth.

“Do not wish to be anything but what you are,” St. Francis de Sales tells us, “and try to be that perfectly.”

Whatever your hopes for the new year, may the days ahead be full of blessings. And if you’re surprised by visitors, may you have time to kick the shoes under the couch.

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