Making amends

I don’t know how I’ll ever do this.

One night in 1991 or ear­ly 1992 in Asheville, North Car­oli­na I was walk­ing home after the bars had closed down and kicked me out. I was very drunk and right after I turned onto Cum­ber­land Avenue I saw a pick­up truck parked on the first block. I’d seen that pick­up truck many times parked on the West side of Cum­ber­land, but I did­n’t know whose it was. Still don’t. The one thing I know is that it had a Steal Your Face dead­head stick­er in the rear cab win­dow, and in my intox­i­ca­tion, that bugged the hell out of me.

I looked at the truck for a moment and decid­ed that I want­ed to hear what it sound­ed like when a tire gets slashed. I just hap­pened to be car­ry­ing a knife with me.

It sound­ed like hissssssssssss. Very anti­cli­mac­tic. No pop or bang.

I do remem­ber the remorse the next day. What a shit­ty thing to do to some­one. You know, it was prob­a­bly some hip­pie kid with a shit­ty job, and he or she got up to go to work the next day and found that the truck had a flat tire. Tires aren’t cheap to replace and it prob­a­bly screwed that kid’s day pret­ty bad. I thought about writ­ing a note and leav­ing some mon­ey anony­mous­ly, explain­ing that I was drunk and had done some­thing real­ly stu­pid and that I was sor­ry. But I nev­er actu­al­ly did that, in part because I nev­er had any “extra” mon­ey to buy a replace­ment and in part because I did­n’t want to be caught putting a note or an enve­lope under the wiper blade.

It’s a regret that stays with me. I have no way of find­ing this per­son and I can’t imag­ine any sym­bol­ic amends I can make that would be sat­is­fac­to­ry. Part­ly I just have to live with myself know­ing that I com­mit­ted an act of cru­el and thought­less van­dal­ism for which I can­not make reparations.

So what about future acts? The ques­tion has come up recent­ly in a total­ly non-tire-slash­ing area of my life. Can I afford to take action that could harm some­one if I know that I’ll nev­er have the oppor­tu­ni­ty to try to right that wrong or even apol­o­gize? It frames my actions from ques­tion­able to: can I afford to take ques­tion­able action that I can’t repair?

I have a lot of lat­i­tude for mak­ing mis­takes in most areas of my life. But I don’t think I can live with cre­at­ing new irrepara­ble harm, or harm where an attempt to repair it would only make the harm greater.

Yes, I have a spe­cif­ic sit­u­a­tion I’m refer­ring to, but I don’t want to talk about the specifics.