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Only a fool refuses to learn from mistakes

By HOWARD TROXLER
Published October 16, 2005

The beginning was the $500 umbrella, unless you want to go back even further, and start with the Story of the Nail Gun.

The Story of the Nail Gun goes like this: This guy I know was hanging siding on a shed with a nail gun. His wife was helping him. She also was telling him that he should Be Careful.

He went down the row, bam, bam. Nail guns are fun. At the end of the row, he put his hand behind the board to steady it and drove a nail right through his hand. Bam. This ended the day's labors.

It took a lot of convincing of his wife to resume work the next day. He argued that he had learned his lesson. Who is wiser than a man who has driven a nail into his own hand? So they went back out to work, and they picked up where they left off.

He put his bandaged hand behind the board to steady it, and drove a nail into his hand in the same place.

Okay, it was me.

Anyhow, the $500 umbrella got bought like this. After years of losing cheap umbrellas, this guy I know bought a nice umbrella for something like $50. The idea was it would be harder to lose.

So, when he forgot it in a restaurant one night, he was plenty ticked off. He stomped out of the house to drive back to the restaurant, muttering. He had switched to parking in the alley behind the house, and the layout was still a touch unfamiliar.

So, he backed his wife's car smack into a telephone pole, which cost about $500 to fix, or just about the size of the deductible on the insurance. Hence the umbrella that cost $500. Later it got lost anyway.

Okay, that was me, too.

This guy I know moved into a new house with a two-car garage. One day, for some reason or other, he parked his truck out in the driveway on the same side as his wife's car that was still inside the garage, behind the closed garage door.

Later in the day, he had to run an errand in his wife's car. So he went to the garage, got in her car, pushed the button to raise the door, cranked the engine and backed out, thereby smashing his wife's rear bumper into the front of his truck. The truck was fine. The bumper cost another $500, or did I mention, just about the size of the deductible, not that I (I mean, he) was going to tell the insurance company.

Anyhow, this guy I know just recently had some brick work done at his house. So the brick delivery truck came and the driver said, where do you want 'em? It seemed like a good idea to put them on the driveway until the work was done, so they wouldn't kill a big area of grass.

The guy stacked them along the side of the driveway, so that both cars could still get in and out of the garage. "You won't forget those bricks are there and back into them, will you?" his wife asked. "Of course not," he said.

After he backed his truck into the brick pile, this guy I know called his wife and said: "I will never again get mad when you remind me not to do something stupid." He resigned himself to a lifetime of being warned not to fall off roofs and ladders, not to hit his thumb with the hammer, and not to drop the dish he is drying or to scrape the nonstick pan.

A few anecdotes does not an idiot make, but, you know, it does raise the question. On top of the spectacular mistakes, add a lifetime of lesser and greater failings: the thing said that should have been unsaid, the pigheaded certitude that was proved entirely wrong, the flash of anger that hurt someone unjustly. In the end the only sane thing is to be grateful that none of it was fatal or irreparable. That Nietzsche guy said that the things that do not kill us make us stronger. I hope this goes for car bumpers, too.

It is not allowed in our modern culture to make mistakes. In our schools these days, a single youthful mistake can get you kicked out of school, barred from graduation. In our politics, the worst thing a person can be accused of is to have changed one's mind, because change is an admission of error, and error is something to be mocked and scorned.

The president bragged the other day that his new nominee for the Supreme Court will be exactly the same person in 20 years that she is today. I came inside from looking at the gouges on the side of my pickup truck and thought: Lord, I hope not.

[Last modified October 16, 2005, 01:31:12]