Choices needed a bit more thought

Maybe it’s the time of year.

Maybe it’s the fact that the years themselves are mounting up.

There’s something about October as I wind my way toward 70 that has me reflecting on choices made that probably should have been given a little more thought.

I look back and I shake my head as I recall:

•Agreeing to spend a night alone in a haunted house. It was the late 1970s and I’d accepted a friendly wager from Ed Eischen, a wonderful, colorful farmer who lived northeast of Portland. It was an old brick farmhouse, which has since been razed. Its first two floors were used for grain storage. I spent the night in the attic, more worried about the potential of an encounter with a rabid skunk than with spirits from the great beyond.

•Hitchhiking back to Indiana from the northeast in 1969 and sharing a ride most of the way with an elderly gent who was heading out to see his grandchildren in Ohio. His big Oldsmobile had an early version of cruise control, and he was afraid of falling asleep at the wheel. So we talked most of the way. We also split a pizza and split the cost of a hotel room in Columbus, Ohio. Hard to know who would be more appalled by those decisions: His grandchildren, my parents or me today.

•Another hitchhike journey, this one from Hueston Woods State Park in Ohio back to the Earlham College campus. There had been a party at the park, and a couple of us had regaled the girls with stories about hitching a ride here and there. One of the girls proposed that the two of us hitch back to campus. We made it safely, but she was petrified much of the way, and I felt completely responsible for her safety. As I recall, we rode in the back of a pick-up truck toward the end of the trip.

•Sneaking out of high school football games in order to soap windows at Halloween, getting back just before the final whistle.

•The last time I wore a costume at Halloween. It was only a few years back, and I’d been told that much of the business community was dressing up. I wore a hat and scarf that I’d brought back from Afghanistan. Looking like an aging Taliban recruit, I arrived at an early morning meeting at the Jay County Chamber of Commerce only to find that no one else was in costume. It was a long meeting, or it seemed that way. At least I didn’t trigger anyone’s post-traumatic stress disorder.

•A number of incidents in high school involving cars, speed and generally reckless behavior. In light of the recent Supreme Court confirmation hearings, I should note that no alcohol was involved. Just the same, who ever thought it would be a good idea to treat the roads at the fairgrounds as if they were a Formula 1 racetrack. In the dark. With the car’s lights off. (I wasn’t the driver, but that’s no excuse.)

•Trying to take a photograph at night during the demonstrations on Tiananmen Square in 1989. It was midnight, and I was getting by with translation from a grad student I’d run into at a conference. A group of demonstrators was singing, and I thought it would be a good idea to climb up on a cart to get a picture of them while they sang. They didn’t think it was a good idea. When I raised the camera to my face, the singing stopped and it felt like a thousand eyes were on me. I put the camera down. Climbed down as quickly as possible and did my best to merge with the rest of the crowd.

•Crossing a bridge over a mountain stream in Kyrgyzstan. The bridge was a rusty iron pipe. The handrail was a strand of cable.

And yet I made it across.

So maybe that one wasn’t a bad decision after all.