Regrets, I’ve Had a Few, 2nd edition. Circa 9/04/2004

 Regrets, I’ve had a few .  .  .  9.02.04

 

OK, it’s true.  I regret that I let Girlfriend hold the water bill.

 

It all comes, of course, from driving a pick-up truck.  Friends assert that I have changed since I traded the Mercedes in for the Ford Ranger.  I’ll admit that I do wear my boots more often these days, and there is something about the side of a pick-up that just begs to be leaned against.  You find yourself saying, “Shucks,” and wondering if it will rain.  But my regret stems from a whole other truck syndrome.  Take a look around and you’ll discover that guys who drive pick-up trucks usually have their girlfriend sitting next to them.  When they cruise through the drive-in at MacDonald’s they never keep the bag themselves – they hand it to their girlfriend.  When they pull up to a tollbooth, they never rummage around for change in the center console; right, girlfriend hands it to them.  Stopped in traffic at the stadium heading for a tailgate party?  Girlfriend hands you a beer.

 

Here’s the problem.  I don’t have a girlfriend.  I had to do all that stuff myself.  It was really bugging me.  So I did the only logical thing.  Right, I went to Wal-Mart and bought a big Tupperware container that fits snugly over on the other front seat.  I call it “Girlfriend,” an affectation I find either droll or pathetic depending upon my current feelings about life.  Now in the evening when I stop down at the end of the drive to get the mail, I slide back into the cab and toss it over to “Girlfriend” as I head on up to the house.  Girlfriend wouldn’t know liberation if it came up and snapped her cute little plastic lid.  She never says, “Hold your own mail you chauvinistic urban trucker wanna be!”  That’s a good thing.  Who wants to listen to that at the end of a long day? 

 

On the other hand, total passivity isn’t all that cool either.  Girlfriend never volunteers, “Hey, hon, this looks important.  Maybe you ought to check it out.”  I mean, it’s a big plastic container for God’s sake.  So the mail tends to stack up there in Girlfriend.  I was cleaning her out this morning when I came across the water bill – under two CDs and an empty Altoids tin.  Girlfriend isn’t very big on neatness.  Problem is, it was due a couple of days ago, and it carried a “new hook-up charge” that wasn’t supposed to be there.  Bummer.  “Girlfriend! Why didn’t you show me this?”

 

She just sat there silently.  Point taken.  It wasn’t Girlfriend’s fault.  It was mine.  I shouldn’t have just left the mail there.  I regret doing it.  But the interesting thing was that regret followed me all through the morning.  It wouldn’t let go.  I mean I knew what I had to do.  Write the check for the legitimate charge and start the bureaucratic hassle of contesting the hook-up fee.  But I couldn’t shake the regret.  It rode along with us; me looking for a parking place and Girlfriend sulking over by her door.  That’s when I began to think about regret as an emotion, as a feeling.

 

I was overwhelmed by the mental image of an abandoned train station.  Night winds out in the middle of nowhere, high plains in winter, tumbleweeds and snowdrifts.  A single lamp flickers behind a cracked window, vainly struggling to hold the cold away.  An ancient engine is hooked to a couple of tired cars, no coal, no will to move.  Regret is a debilitating emotion.  Regret forces us to constantly relive events we freely acknowledge as flawed.  Regret chains us to the past.

 

Life has no rewind button.  The past is over.  Acknowledge it.  Learn from it.  Leave it behind.  Plan for a wiser future, and live that better tomorrow in every moment of your present.

 

“Right, Girlfriend?”

 

“Right, hon.”