Had a visit from an old acquaintance last night when I wasn't quite sleeping.
As always, unbidden, uninvited, but not unexpected.
My unwanted nocturnal visitor?
Remorse, contrition, mortification, chagrin - call it what you will - once again it was standing there in front of me wrapped in a sturdy coat of regret with highlights of shame. (For some reason it’s an old-fashioned oiled canvas duster. I don’t know why.)
You see, one dark night in the early 70’s, when I was still a boy playing grownup, and not doing a very good job of it either, the headlights of my car briefly picked out a solitary hitchhiker on the shoulder. In that split second of bad decisions and malice I jinked the car towards that nameless - blameless - traveler enough to make him leap from shoulder to ditch as I passed on by.
I laughed - one short bark - before the import of what I had just done clamped its clammy hand over my mouth and shoved the remains of that laugh back down my throat.
I have no idea why I did it, and I’m sure that startled wanderer has long since forgotten the incident - just one more asshole in a world full of assholes - but for me it’s another eternal arrow in my quiver of regrets that continues to haunt me 50+ years later.
If anything good came of that night it’s the realization that the shine of good deeds fades fast. The gleam begins to dull as soon as the next vehicle goes by kicking up the first of many layers of time’s dust. But no amount of Clorox can completely remove the stain of regret, no amount of time will eliminate the shame from the comet-trail of a life. So I strive to keep my trajectory as clean and stain-free as possible, because I know there’s a cost to those stains.
