Good judgement is not something that comes at a discount from Costco. You can’t order it and have Amazon deliver it to your door tomorrow afternoon. Good judgement is not handed out rolled inside your high school diploma and cannot be given as a 21st birthday present.
I know these things are true. If my parents had been able to sprinkle it on top of my birthday cakes or spread it like peanut butter on my sandwiches, they would have certainly done so.
I consider myself a middling good person and smart enough to get by but I am occasionally plagued by a lack of good judgement and, as for paying the piper, well, it comes with the territory.
I hesitate to give you examples but here goes… I grew up early. That is not to say I matured early, I just grew up…as in skyward. In the eighth grade I reached the height of six-feet one inch. To my everlasting disappointment, I maxed out there. Combine the clumsiness of that early growth with a tendency toward poor judgement and the result is becoming far too familiar with the emergency room of York County Hospital.*
From carving through a popsicle stick and into my leg with an X-ACTO knife to diving head-first into a brick wall, I kept my parents on high alert even before I reached the terrible teens.
In one extravaganza of bad decisions, at age twelve, some friends and I decided to walk the railroad track from Fort Mill to Pineville, some seven miles or so, on the hottest August day of the year. Compounding the error, I choose not to borrow the money to buy a cooling soft drink when we dragged into Pineville, drank my canteen of tepid water empty before we were half-way back home and then in the topper of all bad moves, refilled it with water from Sugar Creek. Let me explain to those unfamiliar with the area, sugar was not what Charlotte dumped into Sugar Creek. That one cost me a week in the hospital with amoebic dysentery.
Despite the warnings from parents and teachers that high school grades were important, I managed to carry a barely “C” average. My high school counsellor who shall remain anonymous warned my parents that I would not make it through college. Nonetheless, I guess I showed Nannie Lee, I mean “nameless counsellor. Well… she might have been sort of right. After a freshman year of academic probation, I was de-incarcerated and told to move along by the Dean of Students at Presbyterian College.
I don’t blame the school. I blame my friends, who shall also remain nameless, P. K., for studying behind my back. I thought that when they said they were going to the library to study that there were air quotes around “library” and “study”. It turns out that colleges are not just for unsupervised recreation.
But, “Unnamed Counsellor”, I did make it through college. I just needed a humiliating failure to motivate me toward my academic quasi-success. After a successful summer school, I was admitted to St. Andrews Presbyterian College (Now University) and managed to squeeze a few hours of study between my busy hours of poor judgment.
My grades were, let’s say, adequate. In all fairness to myself, I have always learned far more than I showed on tests. I credit the fact that although I often skimmed textbooks, I devoured literature. I am always reading a book, often two or three at the same time. This may account for my sometimes expecting a malicious clown or a wily veloceraptor to appear in a Sherlock Holmes story. They get all jumbled up.
I spent six years in the South Carolina National Guard. Most of the time I managed to keep my head down and stay out of trouble. It was borrowed time and I knew it. My Basic Training was at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, only thirty minutes from where my fiancée, Jane, was in school. When, at the beginning of the last week of training, we were given a day pass, Jane and I were running a little late getting back to base. “What’s ten minutes,” I said. “They won’t even miss me.” Anyone who has ever spent time in the military will wince at that error in judgement.
When we pulled back up beside the barracks, the platoon was already in formation and I was AWOL, absent without leave. The duty sergeant and I had become friends and I thought things would be fine. While training for everyone else was relaxed during the final week, I spent my days sweeping, mopping and waxing the Battalion headquarters and doing countless push-ups. My nights were spent standing guard duty for hours in some remote spot that didn’t even need to be guarded. Turns out, ten minutes late in military life is a lot later than in civilian life. To this day, the mere sight of a mop bucket fills me with dread.
And how has my judgement worked in the area of choosing cars? You’re listening a man who bought a SAAB Sonnet sports car…built so low to the ground that I lost nine mufflers in two years. And for those unfamiliar with cars, the names Corvair and Corvette sound alike and both are small Chevrolet models. My Corvair Monza had a four-speed manual floor shift, bucket seats and a good radio. The road between Indian Land and Monroe was a series of curves and small hills and the perfect road course for a Corvette but, as I said, I didn’t have a Corvette. I only pretended I did.
On one trip back to St. Andrews, the road had just been paved and I was maneuvering that road like Sterling Moss at Monaco. Ralph Nader, consumer advocate, wrote an entire book declaring that the Corvair was Unsafe at Any Speed. After a fifty mile an hour slide across a road and two complete roll-overs, I can confirm that he may have had a point. Fortunately, when the dust settled, I escaped with minor bruises and scrapes and was only too happy to be alive for the inevitable Bob Hill “What Were You Thinking” lecture. The Corvair was a complete casualty.
Speaking of lacking good judgement, at the end of one summer school, a group of erstwhile friends at St. Andrews called on my lack of judgement to help with a ‘Hairy Buffalo’ party. For the party, we rented a house in the middle of a cornfield in rural South Carolina, across the state line from the college. Although called a variety of names, what we called a Hairy Buffalo party centers around a new plastic trash can filled with Hawaiian Punch and an ill-advised variety of types of booze. The result, sometimes called PJ, is a deceptively mild-tasting fruity drink capable of bringing out every form of bad behavior.
I enjoyed the party all the way through the “witty and charming” phase of inebriation. My memory then gets spotty until the point when I was awakened from a brief nap among the rustling stalks of autumn corn. I am without explanation as to why I chose to wander into the cornfield. Thankfully my friends didn’t just leave me there. I am told I was located after a brief search and returned to my dorm room to sleep it off. I awoke, the following afternoon with a blinding headache, a churning stomach and a need to apologize to anyone who dropped by my dorm room to check for a pulse.
I vowed, that day, never to let that happen again and, true to my promise, I have not been near a cornfield since.
Thankfully we are not merely the sum-total of our mistakes. All through life, we judge ourselves harshly but the wrongs of our past don’t rattle along behind us like Jacob Marley’s chains. We are free to live with who we are and not who we once were.
I realize that living as long as I have is a miracle and the result of dumb luck and an over-protective wife who won’t let me go higher than one rung on a ladder. They say God looks after fools and drunks. I have stretched his patience in both areas. As I have grown older, I’ve tried to mend my ways, to look before I leap, and to consider the consequences of my actions.
I hereby promise to follow the straight and narrow path, to keep my eyes on the prize and to run the good race. I just hope, when I get to the finish line, I don’t trip over it.
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