Stuck In His Thumb – Tales of the Immature Brain
The one where the author introduces the Catalog of Regrets with a personal example.
Caution 1: this is a personal anecdote from my university days. I am not a professional brain person and I’m not authorized to tell you how to live. Caveat emptor.
Caution 2: this story has previously been published elsewhere but never online and hasn’t been read by more than 4 people, until now.
Every sensitive and self-aware person keeps something that I like to think of as a Catalog of Regrets. Contrary to some popular thinking, I believe that a person with no regrets is probably a sociopath or incapable of independent thought. Yes, we should avoid making bad choices where possible: the fear of making bad choices can prevent a person from growing wiser. When you make a choice you can’t always predict the consequences. Sometimes you just need to go ahead and do it but it’s a safe bet that you’ll regret some of these decisions later on. Unavoidable, I’m afraid. That’s why we all have Catalogs.
The Catalog of Regrets isn’t usually a physical book. It’s most likely to be a section of your memories about your life and your experiences. You’ll usually associate regrets with fear, anger or sadness but they could become easier to review as you get older. Plus regrets are often ultra-embarrassing, so they make good stories.
I believe most of us would benefit from an occasional glance through our Catalog of Regrets to bring those cautionary tales to the forefront of our thinking. One enormous caveat, of course, is if you’ve experienced particularly traumatic events, in which case you’d probably benefit from the advice of a trained heath care professional before you potentially reopen painful wounds. But for those less painful events I think it’s probably safe to reflect on them.
I want to open up this topic with a discussion of one of my own regrets. Back in the late 1980s my 20-something self, in the throes of the university experience, still had a lot of growing to do and so this story highlights some thoughts of generosity and self-centered thinking.
One year my roommate was a guy who graduated from my high school the same year I did – we’ll call him Romeo. Romeo was a decent guy with a fair mixture of good heart and goofiness. Maybe a bit clumsy. We’re weren’t best of friends but we got along fine, as least as well as an introvert like me could. And of course being a student usually means being poor, which becomes important a little later on.
One fall afternoon Romeo was setting up the bulletin board on his side of our dorm room. The dorm was already decades old and at best could be called clean and spartan but there was plenty of space to put stuff up on the walls. Romeo used pushpins to put up papers, posters and the other artifacts of university student life.
[Pushpin - a pin that has a roughly cylindrical head and that is easily inserted and withdrawn (as from a bulletin board). Thanks Merriam-Webster!]
I still don’t know how this happened, but somehow Romeo got the end of a pushpin stuck in his thumb. Maybe he was goofing around and pounding the pushpins a little too hard. He may have used too much elbow grease to get into a stubborn section of the bulletin board. I think he used something pretty inappropriate instead of a hammer, like a beer stein or a stapler. This caused the plastic cap to break, leaving a short piece of metal embedded in the board. So, instead of being pierced by the sharp end, he impaled his thumb on the blunt end. Hard. And it stuck there.
Romeo, of course, began screaming and jumping around. Who wouldn’t? He hopped around, waving his poor pierced thumb like it was on fire. He tried to pull out the metal pin but he couldn’t get a grip on it – there wasn’t enough exposed metal to remove the offending pin. I tried to pull it out but I couldn’t get a reliable grip on it either.
We looked around for some kind of tool to remove the pin: scisssors, tweezers, even a pair of pliers. Nothing would work. Poor Romeo kept hopping, waving his hands around madly, and bleating. Worse still, when I was actually able to get ahold of the metal pin, Romeo would bleat even harder and beg me to stop.
If I had any experience in animal husbandry I’m sure I would have found a solution (and lost a roommate), but I had reached my limit. He was going to have to go to the hospital and queue up behind the folks who had swallowed quarters, stuffed marbles up their noses, or punctured their eardrums in a Q-tip accident.
The hospital was about a 15 minute walk from campus but Romeo’s mental and physical state would have turned that into at least 37 agonizing minutes. Did I mention that we were both broke? No bus or taxi ride available to the penniless, sorry.
So… I bailed on him. I shrugged and said, “Sorry, I don’t know what else to do. I can’t help you any more.” I kept repeating this and tried to ignore Romeo’s bleats. I felt useless at this point, but I didn’t know what else to do. I walked away.
Eventually Romeo found someone to drive him to the hospital. The emergency room doctor was able to remove the pin. Apparently, the pin had bent when it entered the thumb bone bone, making it harder to remove. But it was removed and Romeo went on to graduate and become a good teacher. And I made my way in life, too.
So if the situation ended well, why do I consider this one of the low points of my life? No skin off my nose, right? It’s not like I had my own pushpin to remove. Romeo and I are on good terms on the very rare occasions that we see each other. We’re Facebook friends, etc. But…..
Remember who I said that both Romeo and I were broke? Well… one of my least redeeming qualities is that I can be a bit greedy. I liked to have my spending money to fritter away when I was a younger man and, to be honest, I still do. I received spending money every two weeks when I was in university and I was running low that day. I could have paid for Romeo’s cab fare to go to the hospital but I didn’t want to blow my cash so I pretended that I had none. So not only did I walk away from helping him with his wound, but I also didn’t help him get there faster.
So this story qualifies for the Catalog of Regrets as a morality failure. I failed as a roommate, friend and general human being. I don’t think Romeo ever held the incident against me but I don’t think he knew that I wasn’t as broke as I pretended to be. I’m not proud of this story
This story happened almost thirty years ago but this memory resurfaces every now and then, especially if I’m dealing with someone in distress. It’s a little reminder of how important it is to be a decent being. You should never walk away from another being who’s hopping around, waving a bleeding thumb and bleating. And that’s a relatively small dilemma. I believe that I’d give up the cab fare if I was in this position again, remembering the different times people have been kind to me.