Crossroads

My home life as a child was very stressful. Not just parental arguments (which were daily), but shouting and threats and occasionally the cops showing up, things getting broken, holes punched in doors, that kind of thing. It was a daily occurrence (the constant fighting, not the out-of-control violence). I think it affected me in ways I probably don't understand. My father was an alcoholic and sometimes I had to be the adult in the house. I remember on more than one occasion thinking, "If I don't go crazy I must have the strongest brain in the world." And then I had to go to school and be around kids and pretend everything was fine in my life. Some kids had it worse than I did. Life is a lottery.

One day my school teacher, Mrs. Peck (I was probably about 10 or 11 years old) gave us a paper to have signed by our parents and returned the next day. As usual, Dad was drunk and he and Mom were fighting like cats and dogs. The next morning Dad had left for work and Mom was rushing around trying to get ready to catch the bus to work, no time to sign school papers. Mrs. Peck called me up to the front of the class and berated me for not getting that paper signed by my parents. I felt totally humiliated, but couldn't explain to her the insanity going on in my house. I remember that incident vividly to this day.

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I read the above paragraphs to my friend CyberDave. He's an insightful guy and I wanted his opinion on whether my young life would make good blogging fodder. With his astute insights and penetrating wit, CD could be a blogger. Oh wait, he is a blogger. His blog is on one of those o-t-h-e-r blogging platforms whose name shall not pass my lips because it is a direct competitor to my blogging platform. But there is nothing in the Bloggers’ Code that says I can’t type the URL and embed it into a hyperlink. Like so: CD’s blog. What follows is CD’s comment on my blog post.

CD: That was a crossroads for you ... a watershed moment.

Me: Why do you say that?

CD: Because you made a choice. You could have signed your mother's name, how would the teacher know? You chose honesty.

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And yet, I really didn't choose honesty. I was taught honesty. In fact, forging my mother's name on a school paper was something that would never have occurred to me. Honesty wasn't a choice; it was my default position on (almost) everything. Let me tell you a story about an exception.

When I was a child I loved sci-fi novels, especially the ACE double novels. It was pulp fiction (the double novels) but I was a kid so naturally I loved it.  Paperback novels cost about 35 or 40 cents. One day I ran across a book that cost 60 cents. It was non-fiction, a book about the Universe. What to do, what to do? I did a dishonest thing. I took the book to the checkout, and when the cashier saw it she asked, "How much?" And I replied, "Thirty-five cents." The cashier didn't blink. She rang up 35 cent paperbacks all the time. So she rang up the phony price.

That minor dishonesty, a mere 25 cents, has bothered me to this day. I don't think about it on a daily basis, but the memory hasn't faded. The memory returns when something triggers it. Maybe the tongue-lashing I received from Mrs. Peck was payback for that minor theft. But was the theft in the past or in the future of my encounter with Mrs. Peck? Can you receive payback now for something that you will do tomorrow or next week? I don't know. It's karma, and there are things I don't know about karma. People who have been to the “other side” and returned to tell the tale say that time doesn’t exist there. Maybe. Sometimes I feel I’ve been given far more payback than the number of bad deeds I’ve committed.

And what about CD? Did he ever sign his mother’s name on a school paper? In fact, he did. Once. And he got caught. Parents’ signatures were on file at that school—allegedly. That’s what the teacher told CD. I find it difficult to believe a schoolteacher will run 30 or 40 kids’ signatures against a “paper database” of signatures to find a kid who forged his mother’s signature. She probably looked at it and thought “that’s a child’s handwriting, but he’ll deny it unless I make him believe I have his mother’s signature on file.” I think the teacher pulled a bluff, and CD should have called her bluff and said, “It’s her signature, so let’s have a look at your file.” I think of all the angles.

Today, and for as long as I’ve known him, CD is honest as the day is long. But maybe that single instance of cheating and getting caught was his crossroads. Sometimes a seemingly insignificant thing has unforgettable consequences. It becomes a watershed moment. We do something we know is wrong. It’s not the size of the deed or the size of the theft that matters. What matters is: we know we are doing something wrong and we do it anyway. That must go ten-fold for youngsters in their formative years.

The first crime is trivial, but the path diverges. The next time you are tempted, you can choose honesty. But if you take the wrong turn, each succeeding transgression becomes easier. I like to think God, or the Universe, or the Next World was sending me a signal. “Go ahead, kid, lie about the price of that book. It’s a trivial matter, but you will find out what it feels like to be a thief.” If that is what happened, the lesson was well learned.

The poet Robert Frost wrote a beautiful poem titled “The Road Not Taken.” It is one of my two favorite Robert Frost poems (the other poem being “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”). “The Road Not Taken” is,  according to people who should know (Google) the most popular poem in America. The poem’s copyright has expired, so I can include it here.

There are only 4 stanzas of 20 verses. But it is the first and final stanzas that speak to me and are relevant to this blog post. Robert Frost wrote this poem as a joke for a friend, the poet Edward Thomas. Frost and Thomas frequently hiked the countryside together and whenever they came to a diverging path, Thomas had great indecision about which path to take and frequently regretted whatever path the pair took. That became frustrating for Frost. Hence, the poem came to be. Frost was gently mocking his friend’s indecision. The poem has multiple levels of meaning, depending on the reader.

When Frost gave his first public reading of the poem, he was quite disappointed when the audience took his poem seriously. If this is a sample of Robert Frost’s humor, he should have written more humor. However, Frost liked to quip, “I’m never more serious than when joking.” So who knows?

      The Road Not Taken

          by Robert Frost

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

We’ve all traveled different paths to get where we are, and we’ve all made mistakes. None of us are perfect. Alexander Pope, in his "Essay on Criticism", said “to err is human; to forgive, divine.”

Mistakes don’t make us bad people; they make us human. Hopefully, we learn from our mistakes. If we don’t learn, we are destined to repeat them, again and again. That cannot end well.