Lessons learned

When I got home, Blondie and Brat boy were sitting in the living room, on opposite ends of the couch.  Calculators, pens, pencils, and books cluttered the coffee table.  I scanned the scene from the doorway, warning sirens blaring from my subconscious.  Something was terribly, terribly wrong.  It hit me all at once, like a sonic boom in reverse, an overwhelming awareness of the absence of sound.  No TV, no YouTube video playing on a cell phone, no arguing, no radio, nothing. At first, the stillness was unnerving.

Just when I was getting used to the quiet, my son said, “Names of the bones in your hand.”

“Good one,” Blondie said. “Like you’d ever need to know that.”  She explained the two of them were playing a game they called ‘useless information.’ They tried to top each other naming what each thought was the least useful information they had learned that week in school.

“You never know what might be useful information someday,” I said. “Every day of my junior season I wanted to quit basketball.  I was miserable.  I spent more time on the bench than some Supreme Court justices.  Every day I talked myself out of quitting. I thought the whole year had been a waste. You know what it taught me?”

“You should have gone out for the debate team instead?” Brat Boy suggested.  

“That I could persevere. When I first got sober and I was really struggling, that lesson, that season, saved me.  Besides, sometimes you don’t even know that you’re learning.  You’ll probably never need to know the bones in your hand, but you might have to memorize something.  Now you’ve got some memorization skills.”

My son laughed. “The bones in your hand? Phalanges – distal, intermediate, and proximal; metacarpal, carpal. Phalanges, that DIPstick, met a carpool in the tunnel.” 

Today I will remember the lesson may be hidden in the experience.

Life on Life’s Terms II © 2015 by Ken Montrose

(Just a reminder: LOLT II is a work of fiction.  Any resemblance to anyone you might know is purely coincidental.)