Dear Jotham My Future Son How I Learned Common Sense and Began to Navigate the Labyrinth of Life

Common Sense Isn't That Common to Me [Part I]

You’ll find that this life is full of obstacles. Most aren’t deadly but those types of obstacles aren’t worth mentioning because you’ll probably live long enough to figure them out for yourself. The subtitle of this book, How I Learned Common Sense, implies that common sense is something a person learns through experience, not by simply being born. Some people learn common sense quickly and others, like myself, learn it very slowly.

One of my first learning opportunities took place when I was eight years old, not long after my family moved from St. Thomas to Woodstock, ON. At this time, I regularly ate Honey Nut Cheerios for breakfast. My parents helped me mail a cheque for prepaid postage to receive the free promotional offer after I collected enough UPC codes from the cereal boxes.

When my honeybee glow-in-the-dark boxer shorts arrived in the mail, I was excited. Now the dark would be afraid of me! The boxers were white with hundreds of little yellow bees buzzing. If I’d known the word back then, I would’ve called them exquisite. As with many things in this life, there was a catch. The boxers only glowed in the dark if you charged them up under a light first. My usual charging method was laying them on my bed with my headboard lamp shining on them but that took a while.

One day, I got impatient and threw the boxers on top of my bedroom’s ceiling light fixture so they’d charge faster. I don’t remember the exact details of what happened after that but my parents may have smelled something burning. Long story short, I suddenly didn’t own glow-in-the-dark boxer shorts anymore. Lesson of the year – don’t put something you love next to the heat unless you want it to burn.

⌂

During my younger and shorter years, I regularly jumped onto the kitchen counter to reach the cookies in the cupboard. This worked great until the day an open cupboard door interrupted my path; a sharp pain soon followed. After touching my head, I saw that I had quite a bit of blood on my hands. Laying down on the kitchen floor helped with the dizziness until my mom took me to the hospital.

After what felt like forever in the waiting room, the doctor called us in and began examining my head holes with a flashlight. I didn’t know what to think. He wasn’t going to find anything in there! The Doctor then gave me a choice in how he’d seal my wound – stitches or staples.

Staples please, I said, dodging a needle to the noggin.

Laying down, I felt a metal object press firmly against my head, followed by the familiar sound of buying candy at the grocery store – Caching, caching, caching, caching. In times like these, the saying look before you leap makes a lot of sense. Staples to the head were less fun than I thought they’d be.

Look left, look right, look down and definitely look up too because inanimate objects can come at you from any direction. Alas, my son, do not fear! I’ll get you a hardhat and steel toes just like mine.

⌂

My family regularly travelled to see my grandparents in Alberta every other summer; they visited us at Christmas in the years between. Whether we were flying kites in the big open sky, shooting hoops with a basketball, picking vegetables in their lavish garden or slaughtering gophers in the open fields, there was always a special sense of adventure in the air. I never had a clue what was going to happen next.

After entering the Calgary airport at the beginning of a trip, I felt an intense urge to use the washroom. The rest of my family did not feel the same way so they continued on the familiar path to retrieve our luggage. Catching up with them after finishing my business would be no problem for an eight-year-old like me. However, the three doors at the washroom area threw me off; I only expected two. The door I walked through led to a stairwell landing with stairs ascending and descending. All I found upstairs was a locked door. The unlocked door at the bottom of the stairwell led to the airport runway. What were the chances of them having toilets out there? I decided to save this one as a last resort.

When I returned to the door I’d originally entered through, I found that it had locked behind me. I started feeling anxious at this point. It didn’t seem like I’d be getting back to my family any time soon. Banging my fist on the door seemed like a good idea so that’s what I did. A few knocking minutes later, the door opened and a familiar face freed me from the lonely staircase dungeon.

Dad!

He had come to check on me because he thought I was taking longer to use the washroom than a normal person would. For the record and my own personal safety, I’ve never claimed to be a normal person since.

I still hadn’t used a toilet when my dad opened the door but I was relieved anyway. The only remaining downside was the annoying alarm that had started ringing. The door that I’d entered through was apparently an emergency exit. We waited a few seconds to see if the alarm would stop and then left to go meet up with the rest of the family. The security officers walking in the direction of the alarm didn’t look our way and we didn’t bother explaining the cause. I imagine that this must have been an interesting story for my grandparents to hear as they drove us from the airport to their farm in Airdrie…

This experience taught me to pay more attention to the doors I walk through. When you enter a women’s washroom by mistake, it’s usually obvious because of the assault of bright pink colours to the eyes but emergency exits aren’t always as obvious. They say curiosity kills the cat but fortunately, for me, I’m not of the feline species.

⌂

During another summer visit out West, my family and I went to Banff National Park to conquer the mountain peaks. Driving through the middle of a giant tree trunk in the middle of the road was a highlight! I also remember listening to Collective Soul’s second album. That CD skipped like a schoolgirl inside the six-disc changer of my grandparents’ green Ford Taurus.

There were at least two ways to reach the top of Sulphur Mountain. We could hike up the switchback trails or pay to use the lift. My parents opted for walking up the switchback trails because it would give us some much-needed exercise, cost nothing and be more fun. Let me tell you, it was the right decision. Few things compare in scale to hiking up a mountain.

As with most families, the slowest person tends to determine the overall walking speed. In physics, they call this, group velocity. My baby sister was the slowest but it’s hard to find fault with her because she was literally a baby.

For the first part of the ascent, I was in the lead with my family close behind. Three-quarters of the way up, I stopped looking back over my shoulder. Not long after that, I forgot to switchback on the trail. I just kept walking up the mountain in the same upward direction. Sliding down the mountainside was beginning to feel like a real possibility but I decided not to worry about it. So what if I hadn’t seen another living human soul for hours, I could hold onto baby trees for grip and waddle uphill just fine by myself.

Something eventually caught my eye up in the distance. People were leaning over the railing to feed mountain goats! Before I knew it, I had climbed over the patio deck and re-entered human society where I belonged. I’m not sure how I ended up reuniting with my family though. Did I find them or did they find me? My young adventure memories are always a bit blurry. Long story short – I didn’t get another chance to go mountain hiking with my parents until decades later.

How to Make Friends

It’s hard to make friends and it’s even harder to keep friends. In light of this, I’ve made some notes about the How to Make Friends philosophy that I’ve been developing over the years so that you’ll have a clue or two.

Don’t loan things to people, it just makes life more stressful and leads to remembering people in not so gracious ways. Oh look, there’s John the jerk, who still has my vintage snow shoes! When someone requests to borrow something from you, I suggest saying, Sure, no problem. You can just keep it actually. Or you could say, Sorry but the answer is no. I don’t want to risk something happening to it. True friends will respect honesty and honour personal boundaries.

Listen to someone when he or she is talking to you. Don’t just wait for your turn to speak. It’s hard (Big Sniffles knows) and you might forget what you wanted to say but that’s OK.

Learn to laugh at yourself. Tell people about the funny things that have been happening in your life! Don’t worry about whether the stories make you sound smart or not (I stopped caring a long time ago). Most people enjoy being around other humans who don’t take themselves too seriously.

Make a joke and take a joke. It’s a two-way street, as long as the jokes are in good taste.

Buy coffee or quality food for your friends and coworkers occasionally. I have yet to meet a person who doesn’t enjoy at least one of these things.

Call your friends on the phone to hear their sweet little voices in real time. Texting is useful but overrated, overused and impersonal.

I Could Have Been a Chick

My father’s father is a Check but my father’s father’s brother is a Chick. Don’t worry – it’s not as confusing as it sounds, there is a completely logical explanation. See, my great-grandfather Henry immigrated to Canada from the Ukraine and the Canadian government made an error with his family papers. Spellcheck was yet to been invented so they accidentally translated one of his son’s last names as Check and the other son’s last name as Chick. By the time Henry noticed the problem, it was probably too late or too expensive to fix. Due to this error, my dad’s side of the family is literally half of what we could have been.

I never met my great-grandfather Henry Chick but I can tell you what little I do know about him. He was a skilled hunter and capable farmer who lived during the Great Depression. He was so skilled he could shoot two birds with one bullet. He didn’t do this for bragging rights but rather to save money on bullets. He would have been friends with at least a few neighboring farmers because in those days people looked out for each other in order to survive. However, I believe there was one farmer Henry must not have known – the man known as Old McDonald (from that famous song). This is unfortunate because learning his song could have helped Henry understand the delicate differences between the English e and i a lot sooner. Who knows, Henry might been able to keep our family together by creating his own personalized version of the song, Old McDonald had a farm, Chick, Check, Chick, Check, Chick, Check, Chock.

Alas, we cannot go back in time and change the past. It’s not the end of the world if our entire family doesn’t share the same last name. What matters most is how we feel about each other in the deepest recesses of our hearts. I cannot begin to imagine how challenging moving from the Ukraine to Canada would’ve been in the early 1900’s. Compared to providing for his family, Henry probably wasn’t that concerned about the translation of his last