My wife Jilda and I wrote a song with our friend Tracy Reynolds called Life 101. In the chorus it says “ sometimes you get the test, before the lesson.” I was reminded this week just how true those words are.
I’m planning foundation work on the barn and old storage shed so I bought a spiffy new concrete mixer. On the way home I also bought four 80 pound bags of concrete.
I almost busted a gut loading the bags so I fetched a wheelbarrow for the unloading job.
The old wheelbarrow has a flat so I used the new one, a combination wheelbarrow and cart. It’s designed with two wheels in front and a single bar handle across the back so you can pull or push. It was perfect.
I positioned it at the back of the truck and hoisted the first bag off the truck and dropped it into the wheelbarrow.
I didn’t take physics in school, my wife on the other hand is a science geek. If I had been I would have understood things like gravity, force, balance and Newton’s Third Law of Motion, “ To every action there is and equal and opposite reaction. The action and reaction act on two different bodies simultaneously.”
Having missed those costly lessons as soon as I dropped that 80 pounds into the front of that wheelbarrow, the front plunged downward, the handle sprang up and whacked my nose so hard I saw stars.
I immediately sat down thought about liberty, life and the pursuit of knowledge and shake the stars out of my head.
Thankfully none of the neighbors had seen anything. But soon I was dealing with pain, nosebleed, and the possibility of two black eyes. I learned something valuable. Jilda or anyone could have told me a thousand times to be careful when loading heavy objects but I would not have listened. Getting hit brought that lesson home.
I can promise this, I will be very careful when loading heavy objects in the future because….”every day is a school day, no matter how old you are, sometimes the test comes before the lesson, welcome to Life 101.”
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