But it is time to answer the posers put forth by the all seeing and all hearing Mama Kat in her weekly Writer’s Challenge! This week I decided to have a go at all of the questions, so …

1.) Why did you do it?

I did it because he looked so lonely and forlorn; a bit like a puppy dog trying to get his first pat on the head. He had moved into our suite of dorm rooms in my sophomore year of college. Kevin would have been labeled with Asperger’s syndrome in the label obsessed world of today. We just thought he was extremely inept in his people interface. I made sure not to ignore him through the year. When spring came around, I helped ensure that he rushed our fraternity and that he became a member. (It really would have helped our chess team if we had one since Kevin played at a Master level when you could convince him to play.)

Over the next year, Kevin’s people skills became more acceptable and slightly more polished. Especially when he relaxed and realized he was amidst friends. I graduated from college early and after graduation I didn’t think much about Kevin. In fact, I didn’t see or hear from him until my 25th college reunion. L and I and the Son were in the cafeteria on the last day of the reunion when a gentleman from another class who looked vaguely familiar insisted on introducing his wife and family and thanking me profusely for making a difference in his life. In the course of our conversation, the light gradually turned on and I figured out it was Kevin. He was then the head of engineering at a very large company and was very clearly happy with his life. His social skills were still rough, but he didn’t let that hold him back. And somehow he believed he owed it all to me and the fact that I didn’t just ignore him.

Thus, I learned the very important lesson that even seemingly insignificant acts can have a major impact on others. It’s something I try to keep in mind every day now.

2.) What is a common misconception about you?

That I am too brilliant to talk to. My friend T (from here) and I have played a lot of golf together over the years. Anytime I’d leave the table or group, T would tell me that others would then come over and quiz him on what we found to talk about; wasn’t he afraid of looking dumb, etc. T would tell them that I was no different to talk to than anyone else. Given that T suffers from severe dyslexia and barely survived high school because of it, he is regarded as the antithesis of an intellectual. So the fact that he and I are friends and spend time talking about every topic under the sun seemed hard for them to understand. But the fact that I have a friend like T is one of the keys to breaking that ice wall of fear that had surrounded my interactions with the others. And for that I am thankful.

3.) Describe a moment when you felt afraid.

I was once involved in a fatal traffic accident. I was driving a truck loaded with fuel down a rural highway when a pickup truck drove out of a field, past a stop sign, and right into me. When I saw that the other vehicle was not going to stop and it was too late to do anything to prevent the crash, I was afraid, very afraid.

I remember how time slowed to a crawl as my knees shoved through the metal dashboard. I remember how the band on my watch expanded and broke and the watch and my glasses flew together into the windshield and then on out of the truck in slow motion. I remember gripping the steering wheel so hard and pushing against it so hard that it literally turned into a pretzel in slow motion in front of my eyes. I remember the intense pain once everything stopped moving. I remember falling out of the cab because my knees hurt too bad to stand. I remember seeing the flames start licking out of the engine compartment of the other truck. I remember crawling back into the cab of my truck and getting the fire extinguisher, and crawling down the road to try to put the flames out. I remember the frustration when the fire extinguisher ran dry and the flames continued to grow. I remember the other driver being unresponsive and having to pull him out of the vehicle as the flames shot to 40 feet in the air around us. And I remember crawling and pulling both us a distance down the road, attempting first aid, and praying for someone, anyone, to come along and help. (This was in the days before cell phones.)

I’ll be forever grateful to the farmer in his field a few miles away who saw the plume of smoke and fire and called the police and ambulance and then came to see if he could help. I’ll be forever sad that the other driver didn’t make it. (He had evidently had a heart attack before the collision and may have been dead even as we collided.) I’ll also be forever grateful that I survived even though it was the end of my football playing days and I spent months using canes to get around. It could have been so much worse. And I’m grateful that now, after a great deal of time has passed, that I can approach a crossroads in a vehicle without dying a mini-death of fear that it will happen again.

4.) In what ways are you turning into your mother?

I think the easier question to answer is “In what ways am I not turning into my mother?’ Most of it is pretty simple: I don’t quilt, I don’t collect recipes, I don’t call myself up to fix my computer, and I don’t spend winter and early spring with the seed catalogs deciding what to grow this year. How’s that for a brief answer?

5.) Are you always right?

Of course!. I have on the wall of my office a sign/plaque from L that reads:

I used to think ….

that growing older was mostly experiencing things in the same way as when I was younger, but just choosing a different balance of things to experience. That meant it wasn’t necessary to savor the complete sensory fullness of each and every moment because it could and would happen again in the future. Now in late middle age, I have come to realize that growing older involves so much more than simple choice of what to experience in what proportion. It involves a complete change in how our senses react and are interpreted internally. And that has immense consequences for the whole idea of the repeatability of experience.

It seems that our very senses change in the way they respond to the world around us as we age. Some sights are not as vivid as they once were whereas others trigger new and powerful emotions by association with the past. Sounds have new and different timbres as the frequency response of our ears changes; music we once thought could not be improved upon now sounds so-so; music that we once deemed merely good now sounds great. The sensitivity of touch changes so that textures take on whole new meanings. A baby’s skin still feels soft, but in a different way than it did in our youth. And the callouses that time and use have created on our fingers means that smooth is a different experience now than it was in younger days. In some ways aging leads to a mutability of experience much akin to the LSD trips popular in our youth.

So now I think that growing older consists of experiencing the world in new and different ways, even if it is the same objective experience from my younger years. And that has consequences in how I view and interact with the world and my possible experiences of it, both in the future and now in the present. It makes me realize there will never be another moment just like the current one in my experience. That in turn means that the current moment is important to savor in all it’s fullness. There will never be another one just like it in my life because even if the same conditions were to recur, my sensory intrepretation of the experience will be at a minimum slightly different. That also implies one should not let life get in the way of fully experiencing all that happens. Now matter how dark or dim the present and future may seem, each experience should be enjoyed fully in the now; there will never be another like it.

That is what I used to think and what I now think. What do you think?

This is a response to Mama Kat’s writers challenge for this week. Click on over and join in.