Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 13:42 — 6.9MB) | Embed
Welcome to Stuff I Learned Yesterday. My name is Darrell Darnell, I just completed my fourth book of the year, [[[The Freaks Shall Inherit the Earth]]] by Chris Brogan, and I believe if you aren’t learning, you aren’t living. In today’s episode of Stuff I Learned Yesterday I share a lesson I learned on cold winter night over 20 years ago.
Today’s Fun Fact of the Day is: Birdman was nominated for 9 Academy Awards including Best Sound mixing, Best Sound Editing, Best Cinematography, Best Supporting Actress, Best Supporting Actor, Best Actor, Best Original Screenplay, Best Director, and Best Picture. It won 4 of those categories, including Best Picture. It is filmed and edited to look like 1 continuous shot, but there are 12 noticeable cuts. The musical score, performed almost entirely by drums, was disqualified by the music branch of the Academy Awards.
Friday Forum
I want you to be a part of the Friday Forum! Friday Forum is your opportunity to Share what YOU’VE learned, so that other listeners and I can learn from YOU. It can be a message as short as 30 seconds or several minutes long. It really doesn’t matter just as long as it’s something that will benefit others. You can participate in Friday Forum by visiting our Feedback Page or calling our voice feedback line at 304-837-2278.
What I Learned Yesterday:
Today’s high temperature is projected to be 26 degrees fahrenheit. That’s much colder than I would like it to be, but I’m not complaining. I know that many of you have endured a long and bitterly cold winter with several feet of snow to show for it. We’ve only had a few inches of snow this season. Of course, we don’t have the equipment and infrastructure to deal with snow like cities in the north have, so it doesn’t take much to wreak havoc in my neck of the woods. But more about that tomorrow.
Today I want to share a story that took place during the winter of my junior year of high school. I was the editor for the school yearbook and I also served as a photographer. I’ve mentioned before that I spent a lot of time outside of school with the yearbook teacher, because we traveled a lot to sporting events and venturing off to the city I now live in so that we could have access to a dark room to develop film.
My teacher’s name was Mr. Harrison and he drove a 1970’s model Jeep Wrangler. It was painted blue, had a big grill on the front, and had the word tenacity across the rear fenders. The jeep was awesome on sunny days. Mr. Harrison had two different tops for the jeep. One was just a shade for the top, often referred to as a bikini top, and the other was a vinyl enclosure referred to as a soft top.
As you can imagine, neither of these options were particularly great for cold weather as they offered little protection from the frigid temperatures. To make matters worse, the soft top was the original one that came with the jeep 20 years before and it was worn out. Many of the areas had dry rotted and cracked. Wind could easily make its way into the passenger compartment and it seemed as though it was doing very little to keep out the cold.
Mr. Harrison was a man’s man though, and he toughed it out. He went to the Army surplus store and bought some blankets. As we drove to small towns to photograph sporting events, we would each be bundled up in itchy wool Army blankets, doing our best to stay warm.
The windshield wipers and the defroster didn’t really work very well either. If we were traveling during a night that involved precipitation, it was not uncommon to see reaching out to wipe down the windshield and him on the inside steering the jeep and wiping down the inside of the windshield.
I think Mr. Harrison and I were both quite pleased when he finally made the decision to buy a new top for the Jeep. When he asked me if I could help him install it, I was more than happy to assist.
Mr. Harrison didn’t have a garage, and he knew that installing the new soft top would take a few hours. So that we wouldn’t have to be out in the cold wind installing the new top, he found a friend who agreed to let us use her garage to do the work. We drove to a Jeep dealership and picked up the new top, and then we drove to his friend’s house to begin the installation.
The soft top fastened to the Jeep by way of a series of snaps that were riveted around the passenger compartment. So we began the installation by unsnapping the old top, piece by piece. If the snaps were separated from the top, we used a flathead screwdriver to pry them off.
Once we had the Jeep cleaned and prepped for the new top, we began the process of attaching the new one. It didn’t take long to realize that there was a problem. Even though the new top said it was designed to fit his model year Jeep, not all of the snaps lined up properly. The new top also included extra snaps just in case this problem occurred, but it meant that we’d have to drill new holes in the Jeep to put the new snaps into. Mr. Harrison had not brought his drill with him, and his friend did not have one.
At this point we had two options. Mr. Harrison’s house was about a 30 minute round trip drive from his friend’s house. It was bitterly cold outside. We could spend the better part of an hour putting the old top back on so that we could have some sort of protection from the cold and wind, or we could tough it out and make the trip with no top on the Jeep.
We decided to tough it out.
We began the trip back to his house and it was incredibly cold. Those wool Army blankets were not nearly enough. I felt like Lloyd and Harry on that little motorcycle in Dumb and Dumber. I’m serious. If I had peed, I might still be frozen solid to that seat.
We finally arrived at his house and he grabbed the tools we need to finish the job. As he got back into the Jeep he looked over at me with an ornery grin and asked me if I wanted a drink from Sonic. He said, “Wouldn’t it be fun to go over to Sonic and freak out the car hop by ordering iced drinks?” I agreed.
By the time we pulled into Sonic we were both so could we couldn’t talk without stuttering from all the shivering. He took a deep breath and placed the order. A few minutes later the car hop came out and her look was priceless. She couldn’t believe that there were two people dumb enough to be driving around in a Jeep with no top and getting iced drinks.
“Aren’t you guys cold?” she asked. I took a deep breath, mustered up all my machismo, and replied, “N-n-n-n-n-o, should we be?” We then admitted that we were totally frozen and we all shared a good laugh. She still thought we were crazy though.
I have no idea if we finished those drinks or not. I do know that we made our way back to his friend’s house and finished installing the new top and the new top was MUCH better at keeping us warm and dry.
Here’s what I learned.
Well, it certainly would have been best if we hadn’t needed to go back and get tools that night. We could have avoided that if we’d gone by to pick them up just to be safe, or if the top would have fit like we expected it to. However, that’s not the way things go. Sure, sometimes things go off without a hitch, but often times we find ourselves in the middle of a situation that’s less than optimal.
At no time did Mr. Harrison lose his cool or express frustration. There were other times when I saw him lose his cool, but this was not one of those occasions. Instead, he led out and had a positive attitude about it. Getting mad would not have made those tools suddenly appear, and only would have served to make the situation worse.
By going over to Sonic and ordered us some drinks, he really made the situation into a fun one. It was fun trying to act tough and try to fool the car hop into thinking we weren’t cold. In fact, it made a really fun memory for me.
This goes back to what Geoff mentioned in his Friday Forum contribution from last week. There are countless times in life, sometimes big moments, sometimes smaller moments that will catch us off guard and deliver to us something both unexpected and undesired. In these moments, whether big or small, what happens next is largely up to us.
How we choose to respond, the mental approach we take, will set us on the path that follows. Will we allow it to set us back, fill our hearts and minds with despair, drive us to anger and defeat? Or will we allow it to only be a setback, a brief blip, and a positive memory.
Make no mistake, these moments to define us, they do shape us. The fortunate thing is, we almost always get to write in that definition and sculpt that shape.
I’m Darrell Darnell and this has been stuff I learned yesterday.
Follow Golden Spiral Media on Twitter at GSMPodcasts and Facebook.com/GoldenSpiralMedia. To subscribe to Stuff I Learned yesterday, visit GoldenSpiralMedia.com/subscribe. If you’ve enjoyed this episode of Stuff I Learned Yesterday, I would be grateful if you’d leave a review in iTunes.
[sc:stuff]