Note: This was written a few weeks ago as a comment/response to another blogger who commented about a son's untimely fender bender around Christmas. As I have been so woefully unprolific lately I offer it as a holiday rememberance - albeit an embarrasing one.
My senior year in high school - I was known to be a fairly literate person - in fact, in the day before e-mail and blogs, I had a mass distribution letter to several friends et al which chronicled everything I did and my loves and wants. People at school would always ask for my "letter" and they would always try to figure out if I was talking about them (again sort of talking in blogger code). It got wildly popular. For Christmas gifts, I would commonly leave interesting paperback books gifts to my "distribution" (which generally consisted of girls I was interested in - and, as with the letter, leave it on their suburban doorsteps in the middle of the night. On one such patrol, but this time at dusk, I left the book, which I think at this time was "I'm Ok, if you're Ok" on one gal's doorstep and I later drove by to see if she picked it up. Only to find myself slammed into a parked car on the street directly across from her house.
And this was Christmas Eve.
I had to go in and apologize prophetically to these people sitting down to a nice Xmas Eve dinner and somehow explain that I just ran into their car because I was looking at a doorstep across the street instead of the road. And then I had to call my Dad to get the car towed and.... well you know. The horror of it all.
The O'Henry twist to the story is that what I wanted for Christmas was a cassette tape deck for the CAR. And that is what I received the next day - for a vehicle that would be in the shop for the next few weeks. If only I asked for hair.
The moral to the story is - "it will get better - it was an accident". There was nothing worse than staring in my father's eyes and trying to enjoy Christmas Eve in this light at 17. The lowest. But I will happily be at his house this year some 30 years later.
1 comment:
Spent four-to-five days there (with one night out to some friends where we usually crash for the night).
There's the usual conflict in schedule stuff as my brother is now dating someone (and her family) in College Station so we had to work in his "availability" and all which caused some drama - but yes it was fine. In fact Deborah and my mother get along so swimingly now it is a bit hard to imagine. I left alone one day and they bought an entire Chico's out.
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