Recently a student who had done something he wasn't proud of stopped by my classroom after school, apparently needing to get some things off his chest. "Mr. Young?" he said glumly, "Have you ever done anything stupid?"
The only question even remotely equivalent to that one is, "Excuse me Pope Benedict, but are you Catholic?"
No human over the age of three months can claim to have never committed an imprudent act or two, and if infants were capable of speech they couldn't deny it either.
As a Little League baseball player over 40 years ago I chased a foul ball into some poison ivy, then inexplicably began rubbing an itchy eye with my unwashed hands not two minutes later. By the time my vision returned the following week I had been dubbed "Cyclops" by my sensitive third grade pals. Fortunately the nickname lasted only slightly longer than the urge to scratch my cornea did.
Several summers later I was part of a crew that was digging irrigation ditches at a local orchard. On a particularly hot day we approached a patch of leafy green vegetation right where we needed to dig. The foreman asked, "Anyone here not get poison ivy?" I seized the opportunity to impress the people paying me $1.85 an hour to perform manual labor by raising my hand and offering, "I haven't gotten it lately." Moments later the other guys were leaning on their shovels, snickering and sipping cold drinks while simultaneously watching a lone, shirtless teenager dig his way through several yards of dermatitis-producing weed. The resulting rash I got was nearly as excruciating as it was unpleasant to look at. I also learned that poison ivy can spread through sweat beads which roll down one's body, and that I should have worn a belt that day.
Intentionally driving a borrowed moped down a flight of stairs while I was in college was dumb. Driving a golf cart (unintentionally) through a window in Florida a decade or so later might have been dumber.
I was well into what is chronologically considered adulthood when I decided to stop making health insurance payments because they had gotten too pricey for someone of my limited financial means. I was playing for two softball teams, a soccer squad, and a basketball team at the time, and later joined a street hockey league. Miraculously I never got seriously hurt while pursuing any of those activities. I did, however, get a case of heatstroke during a mid-day road race while attempting to run five miles in under 30 minutes when the temperature was over 90 degrees. The resulting ambulance ride to the emergency room and overnight stay at the hospital (which set me back better than a month's pay) convinced me to reconfigure my finances, swallow my pride, and re-up with an insurance provider.
I was living in southwestern Connecticut when I qualified for the Foolishness Hall of Fame in the late 1980's. I had become involved with a woman who was everything I wasn't: intelligent, thoughtful, perceptive, kind, adventurous, and funny. She had the body of a goddess and the face of an angel. In retrospect her only tiny flaw was a proclivity for picking immature, simple-minded, self-absorbed boyfriends. She left her car with me before going to Central America for a few months to take a job that involved helping the less fortunate. When she was ready to return she called a week or so before her arrival asking me to pick her up at one of New York's three airports. I didn't like driving in large cities any more then than I do now, and coldly suggested that upon her return she take a bus from the airport to somewhere closer to where I was living. Deflated (or perhaps appalled) by my unique blend of laziness and insensitivity she appealed once again, reminding me that I could use her vehicle to pick her up, and that she'd be coming in around mid-day on a Sunday, when traffic would be at its lightest. Then I remembered a pressing engagement. "I can't come on a Sunday." I whined indignantly. "I have a softball game!" That response clinched me a spot in Idiot Valhalla. Our beautiful and intimate relationship should have ended the moment I uttered those words. It was a mark of her inherent decency that she waited a few days before telling me to my face that perhaps we should be "just friends."
Until recently that was the dumbest thing I'd ever done. However, I recently outdid myself by absentminded asking someone close to me to edit this essay. If you think my old girlfriend sounds like a dream, well, you should have read my description of her before my spouse got hold of it!
Andy YoungReturn to main page
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