So? Question …
VIEWPOINT
By RALPH HARDIN
ralphhardin@gmail.com M y youngest son and his wife will be celebrating their second wedding anniversary next month. Two years into the whole marriage thing and they seem to be doing just fine. He’s teaching school in West Memphis and she’s finishing up her master’s degree over at the University of Memphis. I’m proud of them. Not just for all of the stuff they’re figuring out but also for knowing what they don’t know.
It’s something I wasn’t quite able to do at the age of 24 … admit I didn’t know what I was doing. As a result, I made a lot of dumb mistakes or simply ignored the advice that I’m sure I was given by the people in my life who had my best interests at heart. It’s also possible that I had a lot of the same mishaps that many of you had in your early adult years, like not changing the filter on the central air unit, or ignoring that “check engine” light a little too long, or buying a vehicle with a stupidly high interest rate.
Just me? I doubt it. Anyway, my son and his wife don’t appear to be making any stupid decisions as they work out how to be adults. If nothing else, they’re doing things in the “right” order. I mean, at that age, I was already a father of two and my wife and I were trying to raise our boys while working and going to college and I’m not saying you can’t do it that way, but it certainly wasn’t easy.
No, they don’t have it all figured out, but what they don’t have figured out, they are more than willing to ask someone. I don’t know everything about everything, but in my nearly 50 years on this planet, I’ve managed to acquire some wisdom along the way. Most of it came through doing it the “wrong” way first, but I eventually got done what needed to be done and for the most part, I’ve tried to get the important things right. And along the way, I’ve passed down little pieces of the puzzle here and there to my children. Nothing that would change the world, but stuff like knowing to loosen the lug-nuts on the spare tire BEFORE jacking the car up, or keeping one old pair of sneakers to be your “working outside” shoes so you don’t have a bunch of old nasty shoes, or take the extra 30 seconds to wait for a chance to make that left turn instead of risking an accident.
For the bigger stuff, I’ve done what I could to steer them down the right road, even if it’s a road that I didn’t go down myself until much later in life. My favorite piece of wisdom, and one I’ll share with my daughter when she’s older (and I’ll share with you now) … unless your income level is way above mine, don’t ever, ever have more than one vehicle payment at a time. There were two occasions in which my wife and I were both paying off vehicles we had financed and it was a giant pain in the butt. Not only are you making two car notes every month, you’ve got to carry full-coverage insurance on both of them, and when you finally do get them both paid off, you’re both probably driving pretty well-used cars that will either require expensive repairs or both need to be traded in on newer models (repeat the cycle over again).
But anyway … I always know when my son and his wife are about to take some new leap when one of them, usually my daughter-in-law, goes, “So? Question …” Then, it’s something like, “Do you recommend getting a credit card? And if so, do you recommend using it and paying it off each month or just saving it for emergencies?” Or, “So, what’s a good price for a rental house?” Or, “How does one go about getting health insurance?” These are all great questions they have asked at some point over the past couple of years and they are all questions I should have asked someone at that age instead of charging blindly into situations that ended up with me having 10 credit cards, each with a limit of around $300 and paying $200 a month on minimum payments that did nothing to lower my balances for over a year. I also don’t treat them like idiots for asking questions that might seem like common sense (because I’ve been there too).
I said all that to say this… I’m turning 49 in August. I’m doing OK. Like I said earlier, I don’t know everything about everything but I do at least now know what I don’t know, and that wisdom includes knowing to find someone who has the answer I need and saying, “So? Question …” And you know what I do now when the “check engine” light comes on? I check the freakin’ engine … Well, I take it somewhere and have someone who knows what they’re doing check it.
See? Wisdom!
