🫂A day of Fun with Old Friends, and a Lesson Learned🫂
My wife and I recently went out of town on a day trip to visit two of her high school classmates. Pat & Paul have been our good friends for several years, and we haven’t visited them in almost two years. It was time to make it happen, so we contacted them, set a date and time, piled into our truck, and headed toward their home.
About 1½ hours later, we pulled into their driveway at 10:45 am, disembarking quickly and walking up to the front door of their beautiful new home. Their huge neighborhood was still developing, and new houses were being built everywhere.
Pat met us at the door and welcomed us in. Paul was taking a quick nap and joined us shortly. Wonderful conversations flowed constantly as we tried to catch up on each other’s lives. After a delicious lunch, they took us down to the clubhouse and gave us a tour of the facilities, which included a gym. I immediately jumped on one of their treadmills and cranked the speed up to what I thought was the speed of those in our retirement community.
That was not a very well-thought-out idea. Immediately, I was running at a pace that made it impossible to reach the panel to slow down the darn thing. I was running at sprinter’s speed, unable to reach the controls, and wondering what I would do to stop this runaway monster that was intent on breaking my body into smaller pieces. Then it dawned on me: I had attached the emergency pull switch to my belt, which I always do, and all I had to do was remove one of my hands from the two arms that extended out for me to hold on to and pull on that string, forcing it to stop immediately.
Unfortunately, the thought continued to course through my brain that if I removed a hand from either support, I was going to be tossed violently somewhere, and my life was going to be consumed by pain. My wife, along with Pat and Paul, were somewhere else in the gym, unaware of my plight, and my hope was they were not bearing witness to my lack of good judgment.
Finally, knowing that exhaustion was galloping with great speed in my direction, I quickly removed my right hand from the treadmill arm and grabbed at the emergency string attached to my belt. My first effort failed, and just as I was preparing for the ultimately violent ending, I made another desperate snatch for the string and struck pay dirt. It stopped immediately, and I disembarked casually, as if nothing unusual had happened. It’s just human nature to cover up our poor judgement 😊. One thing is for sure, I will never, never make that mistake again. Afterward, we sashayed back to our friends’ beautiful home and continued our enjoyable conversations. We left around 3 pm, our hearts full of warmth and laughter, reminded of the importance of genuine friendships. I have never mentioned my near disaster; I have told no one but you, so don’t you dare ever mention it! 😊….Tommy
