Expensive Tuition
Foreshadow
Resistance to authority can manifest in many ways. I have a friend, for example, who has the need for speed and insists that the speed limit is merely a suggestion. He's angry when he inevitably gets pulled over for speeding and is mean-mouthed with the police officer about it. This, of course, only gets him in deeper trouble.
My own resistance to authority manifests much differently. I seem to be constitutionally incapable of taking good advice or learning from the mistakes of others. I listen to the good advice and observe others making their mistakes, but have a streak of stubborn hubris that deludes me into thinking I can do better. “It won't happen that way for me,” are my famous last words. It always happens that way for me too because, well, it happens that way for everyone (duh).
Karma
Until I got big enough to work my own chainsaw, my job was loader. I was to keep the cut firewood out from under Dad's feet and turn big logs over with the cant hook, so he didn't have to saw dirt to get all the way through. The only thing that will dull your chain faster than dirt is a rock and I kept those out of his way as well. I chucked the cut pieces of wood in the back of the truck and then climbed in to stack it neatly. He wanted me to pick it up and carry it, walk with it. Place it gently on the tailgate. Please. I don't know how many thousands of times he said “You shouldn't throw the wood in the bed of the truck like that, you'll break the window.”
Smug in my finely honed sidekick skills, I'd roll my eyes at him and toss the wood anyway.
Dad and I had put far too much effort into that stack of firewood for me to leave it behind at the house I was moving out of. The only time I could go out to Parks and get it was after my workday was done. I was working furiously against the approaching night, throwing wood into the bed of the truck as fast as I could. I didn't look up more than about one piece in ten to see where or how it landed. The spirit of my recently deceased father settled on my shoulder and said, You should stop for a minute and get up there and stack your load. You're going to break that window. I paused long enough to brush him off my shoulder, gently, like a moth, and bent down to lob the next piece. I glanced up to see it bounce off of another piece of wood in the bed of the truck and catapult squarely through the back window of the truck. It hit the window end on and smack in the middle.
A catapult, as you know, magnifies energy. I doubt I could have thrown a piece of wood that big hard enough to make that distance at that height. I couldn't have hit the window any more squarely if I'd been aiming for it. I learned in that very same moment just how small and numerous smithereens are. If you, say, hit a softball that accidentally goes through someone's living room window, the glass breaks, sure, but it breaks into big pieces. Pieces you can pick up. But this truck window, oh. Who knew one piece of glass could shatter into so many tiny pieces? No one smithereen was bigger than a grain of rice.
It was very dark and very cold before I had swept as many smithereens out of the truck as I could with a flashlight, whisk broom, and dustpan. Not wanting to leave broken glass in the yard for the sake of the dogs and everybody else, I was careful to get all the broken glass I could in a garbage bag and left the rest in the cab. I drove home with late October's icy fingers stroking the back of my neck through the gaping hole behind my head, and with glass shards poking my butt. And with less than half of my wood pile.
The spirit of my father, dead these many months, settled back on my shoulder and we rode on together to Williams in companionable silence. I was raised by a kind man. He would never be so mean as to laugh at me about it or tell me I told you so. But he didn't need to, I could hear his eye roll clearly from the other side of the veil between this world and the next.
Expensive Tuition is an excerpt from Terryl’s forthcoming collection Saturday Morning Cartoons, a collage of painless vignettes with a moral to the story. Terryl had every opportunity to learn this lesson the easy way, but she was having none of it.
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Terryl is grateful to, and for, her wonderful father. He was a smart, gentle, and loving parent, the likes of which few are lucky enough to get. She never fully appreciated him until he was gone.
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Terryl Warnock is an eccentric with a happy heart who lives on the outskirts of town with her cat. She is known as an essayist, proof reader, editor, maker of soap, and proud pagan. A lifetime student, she has pursued science, religion, and sustainable communities. This, plus life experience from the local community service to ski instructor, from forest service worker to DMV supervisor, from hospitality to business owner gives her a broad view on the world.
Terryl is the author of:The Miracle du jour, ISBN-10: 0989469859, ISBN-13 : 978-0-9894698-5-2
AJ Brown, in a past life, was an embedded systems engineer (digital design engineer). He worked on new product designs from hard disk controllers, communication protocols, and link encryptors to battery monitors for electric cars.
A few years ago he surrendered his spot on the freeway to someone else. Now he is more interested in sailing, building out his live-in bus for travel, and supporting the idea of full-circle food: the propagation, growth, harvest, storage, preparation, and preservation of healthy sustenance. He is a strong supporter of Free/Libre Open Source Software[F/LOSS] and is willing to help most anyone in their quest to use it.
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