Surviving Stupidity and Succumbing to Wisdom

There’s no way to hack fate.

A reviewer in the New York Times Book Review reminded me of some painful moments in my past. The writer commented on a hiking trip with a friend and a near-tragic crossing of a frigid mountain stream. His friend almost tumbled into the water, which could have had dire consequences. I felt the writer’s pain when he said he couldn’t sleep that night, even though the trek turned out well.

I used to work in an emergency department and saw people come in with horrific injuries after taking their eyes off the road for a second, or slipping on a highly waxed floor and breaking many bones.

Doctors and nurses walked around with a “there but for the grace of God” attitude after working on these patients. They knew you could do everything right and get slammed by a random act of fate having a bad day and taking it out on you.

My emergency room experience taught me that for all our bluster about being invincible, we humans are more fragile than we realize.

Oh, and way more stupid. I wonder why we don’t take more care in our daily actions.

Take me as a case in point.

Sometimes I’m amazed I’ve survived to my advanced age of eighty. I’ll give you three examples of my youthful stupidity, all the more frightening because, in each case, I believed I was acting like an adult. Any one of these incidents could have killed me and others.

1. Crossing the railroad tracks with a stroller.

I admit it. I’m always in a hurry. Even with my cane, you can find me tapping it behind a group of stragglers on the street as I try to pass them to get to my destination. No, it’s not because I’m trying to finish my bucket list before I kick the bucket. I’m just freaking impatient.

A little less so, however, than the day I took my toddler daughter out for a trip to the shopping district in our town. Her father took our one car to work every day, but no worries, I’d put our little darling in the stroller and took off.

A word about the old timey strollers. We’re used to baby furniture built these days as sturdy as the Mars Rover. Back in the day, a stroller was a piece of canvas with two holes for the kidlet’s legs strapped to some flimsy aluminum tubing and running on matchbook wheels.

To get to the shops, I had to cross railroad tracks. This day, the signal starting clamoring that a train was coming, but the arm hadn’t come down. In my usual hurry-up fashion, instead of waiting for the train to pass — I could see it down the track — I made a run for it. Except the rickety wheels of the stroller got caught in the tracks.

The arm came down behind me. The train whistle sounded louder and louder. I pulled and tugged on that stroller, but it wouldn’t budge. The train was coming at us at full speed. My daughter, barely a year old at the time, sat blissfully playing with her fingers while panic raged through my brain.

The engineer of the train could see us by now and was blasting his whistle for us to get out of the way.

If only we could.

Why I didn’t think to just scoop up my daughter and run across the tracks, I don’t know. But suddenly behind me, I felt two strong arms lift me and the stroller and race to the other side of the road just as the train rushed by us.

The man read me the riot act.

What the hell is wrong with you, lady? Didn’t you hear the signal? Or something to that effect.

I was close to tears, I was so frightened. Not for myself, but for the peril in which I had placed my daughter. Just to save a possible three seconds.

Suppose the man hadn’t been walking behind us? Suppose, suppose, suppose.

Yet, somehow, we survived my stupidity. Yet writing this even now makes my heart race a few beats faster, thinking how close I came to disaster that day.

You’d think I’d never make a stupid mistake ever again after that one. Well, think again.

2. A 100-mile an hour ride on a dark country road with a man under the influence.

My first husband and I had best friends named Wendy and Doug. We didn’t have much money so we often spent Saturday nights together, either at our house or theirs, saving on babysitters and dinners out.

Back in the day, no one worried about drinking and driving. If they did, we didn’t get the memo.

To be clear, there was a lot of drinking and a lot of driving. We didn’t walk to each other’s homes. You get the picture.

Doug had indulged in a new sports car. Driving, racing, and fantasizing about owning sports cars was the major parlor game played by our husbands back then. This particular evening, my husband and Doug, after imbibing the usual amount of cheap alcohol, which was always too much, talked about Doug’s new Austin Healy going over 100 miles an hour.

I chirped up with, “I’ve never gone 100 miles an hour,” apparently forgetting my cross-country airline trips. But I’d consumed my share of cheap alcohol as well.

Doug gallantly offered to give me a ride at 100 miles an hour.

Wendy, always the practical member of our foursome, shrieked, “You will not. She has a baby to think about.”

I don’t recall my husband’s reaction, but he didn’t object, even though he was the helicopter parent of the two of us.

Over Wendy’s objections, Doug and I went into the night in his chariot. We lived near a low range of mountains, and we climbed up the deserted roads to a fairly flat stretch, though most of that road was curvy as I recall. No lights, of course, but fortunately, no other cars.

Doug jammed on the gas and said, “This is it. We’re going 100 miles an hour.”

We may not have worried about drinking and driving back then, but the CHP never looked kindly on speed demons.

But a hefty ticket is the least of my nightmares as I look back on that night. Every time I read about a drunk driving accident, I’m reminded of how lucky I am to have survived another episode of stupidity.

As for the excitement of going 100 miles an hour? On a dark country road, with a driver who’d had too much to drink? Frankly, I couldn’t tell the difference.

3. Charming a mama bear to come closer for a photo op.

Okay, I’m not taking the fall for this one. My daughter’s father was as much responsible for this act of sightseeing while dumb.

I do cut us some slack for being innocents abroad. We had taken our first camping trip up to Oregon and a side trip to a national park. We drove in, paid our fee, and I tucked the reading material into the glove compartment without even scanning it.

As soon as we were out of sight of the ranger station, we spotted a family of bears crossing the road. Our daughter was about five at the time and thrilled beyond words. Even then, she loved animals more than humans.

We were driving his father’s convertible with the soft top up. He slowed down and then stopped when the bears stopped to examine us and padded over to the car. Somewhere I have pictures that I snapped from the passenger seat.

The biggest bear came over to my side. I can recall that she put her long claws carefully on the canvas top of the car as if she knew how fragile it was. With the bears distracted on my side of the car, my husband took the camera and got out of the car to snap more photos.

He bent down, oh, I would say ten feet from the bears to catch us all in the shot. Probably one great leap for the bear if she had turned on him.

I say that because the bears lost interest in us and walked into the trees. My husband got back in the car, and we continued on our way.

Shortly, I had to get something out of the glove compartment. I put the reading material on my lap and as we drove through the scenic park. Soon, I scanned the park’s instructions.

Big headlines: Don’t go near the bears!!!!

My blood froze as I recalled the bear’s claws on the top of the convertible. How easily she could have ripped her way into the car and attacked us.

Just give me a minute, and I’ll catch my breath. That’s what remembering that act of stupidity does to me.

There have been others, but I think you get the picture. I’m a reasonably responsible person who raised my daughter to a successful adulthood. Based on her life, her professional accomplishments, her kindness, and integrity, you’d say she had very good parenting.

All true, except for those moments . . .

And then there was the time I obeyed the rules. I didn’t take any chances. I did exactly what I was told and had disastrous results. Riddle me this. How could I have done the smart thing and come out on the short end of the stick each of these three times?

1. My first stock investment tanked and wiped out my savings account.

Everybody said the stock was a sure thing. A Silicon Valley darling with a good track record. I had built up a bit of savings account, discretionary spending I called it. I could have either paid off a credit card or doubled my money because this stock was going to split and go ballistics.

Everybody said so.

I was so nervous because I didn’t know how to play the market, but I asked experts and was given the same advice. It would be like buying Home Depot on the first day it was offered.

I lost sleep agonizing over it, then someone said, you’ll lose out if you don’t act. So I emptied my little account, $6k worth at the time. The rest is history, or not. Yeah, you’ve all been there. The sure thing that wasn’t.

2. I didn’t buy the house that would have paid for my retirement.

Too many times in my life, I’ve relied on other people’s advice. This one time. I looked to someone I thought was a financial whiz when I should have looked elsewhere. Many years ago, I rented one half of a duplex in an affordable neighborhood in a very upscale city. How upscale it would become, no one without a crystal ball could know back then. At least, I couldn’t, but I did know it was a deal when the duplex came on the market.

I needed help with the down payment and asked someone with deep pockets to go in with me as an investment. Not a romantic someone, but someone I trusted with a track record making money.

“You don’t want to buy that dump,” he said. “We’ll find you a great house.”

I took his advice and stopped looking for financing. Except we never did look for another house and that down payment would have been available from other sources, I later found out. And that “dump” would have paid for my retirement.

3. Surgery that fixed my knee and ruined my life.

Okay, I’ve written about this one before. I reluctantly followed my surgeon’s advice and a minor operation on my knee. Seriously, what else could I have done? The pain was agonizing. I had a piece of cartilage stuck in the joint and he’d just remove it and I’d be fine in a few days.

Except something went wrong, and I had a minor stroke. As strokes go, I’m lucky. I’ve written about that. But a stroke is a stroke, and for the rest of my life I will struggle with balance and increased risk of falling. I wonder if I could have toughed out the pain in my joint for a while until the cartilage worked its way out of the joint.

So much for doing everything right. The lesson I take from my life? I do my best not to do anything stupid anymore. Still working on that.

And as far as following good advice, still working on that too.

m an editor and writer on Medium with Top Writer status in several categories. I’m also an editor for the publication, Rogues Gallery. I’ve published 55 titles on Amazon and edit for private clients. If you’d like to hire me as your editor for fiction, non-fiction, or business writing, please contact me here. If you’d like to read more of my work on Medium, click here to sign up for my newsletter. I’ll make sure you don’t miss a word. Thank you for reading.