By Jim Hagarty
2014
A young man I know, not yet 20, came to my door yesterday.
I opened the door, but didn’t invite him and his friend in, just stood in the doorway and chatted.
Then he held up a set of keys and pointed towards his new truck in the parking lot next door. I looked out at it. “Brand new?” I asked. It was a 2011, but what a honey. Cherry red, a big beauty of a machine, one of Detroit’s finest.
I asked him a couple of friendly questions about it and he was on his way. I closed the door and went back to my computer. Even as I did, it hit me that I had missed a chance you don’t get too often.
I should have gone out to the truck, had a good long look at it and asked for a ride. A hardworking farm boy so proud of his new truck it was almost as though he had built it himself, he was showing it to everyone, even the Dad of one of his friends. It wasn’t the reason he came to my door, but he showed me the truck nonetheless and told me about it.
Before I sat back down, I thought that maybe I could still run out and catch him but it would be too late and too obvious what I was doing. No do overs on something like that. Maybe next time I see him…
It wouldn’t be as though I was being phony. I love trucks. What country boy doesn’t?
Young people need encouragement and validation that what they do and who they are matters.
All I have to do is remember the times in my youth when a sincere pat on the back from someone I maybe hadn’t expected one from, made all the difference.
Part way through my journalism career, when I was writing a weekly humour column for our daily newspaper, I was sitting with my wife in a movie theatre, waiting for the show to start. A woman sitting behind me tapped me on the shoulder and asked, “Are you Jim Hagarty?” I confirmed my identity.
“I keep a scrapbook of all your columns,” she said. I really enjoyed the movie that night and my columns, however good they had been up to that moment, were noticeably better after that.
Around that time, I was in line in a coffee shop when I saw a column I had written about coffee drinking taped to the cash register for all to see.
For me, this all goes back to one thing: The basic need every human being has to be loved. To count. To matter.
So if you see me riding around town as a passenger in a shiny red truck some day, you will know I took my own advice.
For once.
