He Can Be Taught

Many of us were taught while growing up that if you're carrying a sharp object and you drop it, let it fall. It's great practical advice, you know.

Among the accessories available (I adore alliteration) for the drain snakes I sell are retrieving tools. They are sharp and typically pointed objects. They have to be, so that they may puncture and burrow into a blockage in a drain and retrieve it. 

A year or so back I was carrying not one but two of them into a customer's office. And I dropped both. And I tried to catch them. 

It was like a juggling act which had gone off the rails. There I was trying to corral those two retrievers, each bouncing off my hands one to the other, and each time digging a barb into my palms. "Oh, ah, oh, ow," I repeated many times over trying desperately to grab them. Of course, they ended up hitting the floor anyway.

Why I had two handkerchiefs I don't know (usually only having one) but it was fortunate that day. I had to wrap them around my hands driving home, hoping the bleeding would stop by the time I got there. Tiny puncture wounds take awhile to seal.

The moral of the story, in case you - as I - didn't get the lesson originally: if you drop a sharp object, let it fall.

The Realization

While logging into my AOL account yesterday I saw an article which proudly offered an easier way for seniors to trim their toenails. I clicked on the link, thinking, oh, I should check that out. It might be useful.

And this is what my life has become. 

Heavy sigh.

Experience and wisdom

So, last Friday I was replacing a light fixture in our upstairs hallway. Easy peasy, right? Only the ends of the electrical wires feeding into the fixture were badly frayed. So I thought I ought to peel them back a bit.
All went well until I was trying to shave off about a half-inch of insulation from each side of the power cord. I had just thought silently to tell myself that the knife I was using was sharp and that I should be careful. But Hell, I'll be done in a second, right?
I was done in a second. Done enough for my knife to slip and cut every bit of a quarter inch deep into the pointing finger of my left hand.
It hurt and it bled. Luckily I was five feet away from the basin in our upstairs bathroom. I jumped into it and ran my bleeding finger, bleeding like a stuck hog as the saying goes, under hot water for several minutes. Then I applied pressure, fixed gauze and white tape, and stopped the blood flow. I then finished the job.
A few minutes later I was explaining to my daughter the lesson I'd learned: cut away from yourself. I added, "Experience is when you learn from your mistakes. Wisdom is when you learn from the mistakes of others."
My darling daughter only smiled and said, "You just learned from experience. I just learned from wisdom."
Well, what could I say?