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.