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.
Well-written. I tend to block out events like that, but every once in awhile, they creep back into my consciousness. I was with someone who did the thing you described, but with more evil. When I was 14 and on vacation with my family in Biloxi, Mississippi, a teen driver gave me a ride back from the golf course. On the way, he drove onto the shoulder to force two young black men off the shoulder. And he screamed the N word out the window. Frightened the heck out of me. I should have said something to him, but I just meekly got out of the vehicle when I got to the hotel. There, back in my consciousness again.
ReplyDelete1975 to 1978 I lived just down the road from Biloxi in Pascagoula, but the transgression in this post was a couple years before that in Virginia
DeleteThe older I get the more my poor actions haunt me.
ReplyDeleteIts too bad it takes experiance, wisdom, and age to understand the consequences of questionable actions, giving us plenty of time during our 'growing up' to collect a whole library of hauntable actions
DeleteNOW! Let's recount something positive. This isn't bragging...it's what we do; who we are now.
ReplyDeleteI was driving up one of the main thorough-fares toward the mountains. There was a guy with a big backpack, a gallon jug in one hand and a bag in the other. As he moved he looked as if it was all he could do to put one foot in front of the other. I recalled how when I too had a heavy pack (sometimes metaphorical) and people had offered a hand.
I circled back and pulled into a parking lot where he was, got out and asked him where he was going. He seemed a bit taken aback and after a moment said he was going across the street to camp. I looked and saw a triangular lot of cobbles, a kind of a no-man's land.
I asked how he was fixed for money and he said he had $20 but he was homeless. I said, "Well, you can never have too much money, eh?" and gave him a $20."
As I turned to go, he extended his arms out at waist level with his palms down and started muttering, apparently lost in his moment. I thought, "There but for the grace of god."
We've been lucky, yuh know?
I don't gift every homeless, but I look for the ones where I might help a little. Not necessarily to make up for the times that I didn't; more an expression of who I've always been -- even when I couldn't or didn't do what I should've.
Lucky or blessed - that we have! We try to spead a few dollars here and there to locals or local organizations.
DeleteThey say to live in the moment but it's hardest thing I have ever attempted and am still not successful. I just finished a long blog in my person journal about regrets, just a few minutes ago. The past never stops haunting us it seems, no matter how great we have it.
ReplyDeleteIt's the human condition!
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