Thankful For The Stories That Stay With Us
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DAVE’S WORLD
By David Howell
I came up short on serious column material this week — unusual, but maybe timely as this is a good time to count our blessings. Thanksgiving has always been my favorite holiday, and our house is already staged for the big day. And I’ve also been strongly warned not to make any messes.
That’s a tall order, considering my instinct is to stack, pile and generally clutter. I own more stuff than places to put it, and I have high hopes that a nice big shop will materialize one day. The older I get, the harder it is to throw anything away. “I might need that,” I say, even when I know I won’t.
And then, of course, comes the familiar refrain: “WHERE DID YOU PUT MY…?”
Truthfully, at this stage in life, I’m usually the guilty one — sticking something somewhere absent-mindedly and forgetting where it landed.
Speaking of being thankful, Coffeeville Mayor Brad Ayers’ family has a big one this week. His 11-year-old son had to be rescued Monday after getting stuck in the vault of the old Renasant Bank building. I haven’t talked to the mayor directly, but the story got around fast. The town owns the building and hopes a bank will eventually reopen there. In the meantime, the mayor’s two boys were playing around when one of them ended up locked inside the vault.
Renasant had changed the combination when they closed — standard procedure — and the boys had managed to twist the time lock. It was set for something like five days before it would open. Long story short, a Memphis company came down and drilled the lock. The door opened around 4 p.m., after the youngster had been in there since before lunch.
A predicament, yes, but boys will be boys, and it ended safely. I imagine the Ayers will count their blessings a little harder this Thursday.
All this had me thinking about my own childhood shenanigans. I only broke one bone growing up, and it was entirely my fault. I did something that made my older brother mad, and he chased me up a redbud tree in our front yard. I slipped, fell and landed on my arm. I started second grade in a full cast and had to write left-handed for a while. That must have been the semester they taught penmanship — which explains a lot about my handwriting today.
There were other stunts, too — a few that still give me a twinge of guilt. In ninth grade, for reasons I still can’t explain, I pushed in the lock on my history teacher’s file cabinet. He didn’t have a key, and our graded tests were trapped inside for a couple of days until maintenance finally freed them.
It wasn’t the crime of the century, but the timing and the target made it feel worse. He was one of the kindest teachers at South Panola, a man battling a crippling disease who would pass away far too young. The next day in class, he said he couldn’t understand why anyone would do something like that — never angry, just disappointed. And that somehow made it stick with me even more.
Thankfully, I only made a couple of trips to the police station. The first one was at age 17, for throwing water balloons and breaking a few windshields. This was on a hot summer night on Highway 35 north of Batesville. When the factory shifts let out, traffic lined up — perfect targets for teenagers with poor judgment. We hid in the tall corn, seemingly invincible whenever someone stopped to chase us. The chase was the fun, and it was all fun and games until the police showed up.
We were well hidden, but my pickup wasn’t. Batesville was small enough then that everybody knew everybody’s vehicles, and my truck stuck out like a sore thumb. When the officer eased around the cornfield, he recognized it instantly. Batesville’s finest, Officer Roy Wooten got on the loudspeaker:
“David Howell, David Howell, come out of the field immediately. John Howell has been notified.”
Oh no, not my Dad. No cornfield on earth could save me then. I know the officers enjoyed watching us squirm as they rounded us up. I remember a good pep talk, too, as we were put in the back of the police cars. For added emphasis, the officer slammed the rear door and somehow shattered the glass. He had our full attention.
We ended up buying several windshields that night, and things were a little tense around the house for a while.
The worst part? I was always the scared one in the group — the first to run, the guy worried about all the “what ifs.” I hid my truck earlier that night, just in case. But when we ran out of balloons, we had to refill, and round two found the truck out in the open.
The second trip was a year or so later, and this time it was campus police at Northwest Mississippi Junior College. I was innocent that time — I was working when a few guys in my second-floor dorm room used a slingshot to create a little havoc. One of them, my roommate, was in on the corn-field action too. The campus police never could prove it, but they knew.
There was this other time… Never mind, this is already a little lengthy.
But looking back, I’m grateful most of my misadventures ended with lessons instead of headlines. Thanksgiving has a way of reminding us that even the messy moments — the guilty ones, the close calls, and the downright embarrassing ones — eventually turn into stories we laugh about. And if we’re lucky, we even learn a little something along the way.
