COROLLARY by B. A. Brittingham

COROLLARY by B. A. Brittingham

Admittedly, I am an avid collector of seemingly useless snippets of information garnered from the pages of newspapers and magazines. I came across one of these clippings shortly after publishing a piece about national lessons learned from painful experiences such as Vietnam, and it occurred to me that the quote contained a corollary to the issue of lesson-learning.

According to the Heublein National Accounts Division, (now defunct) we retain 70% of what we learn when that knowledge is acquired through our own doing, but only 10% through what we hear. This would seem to indicate that we are a race of blockheads inclined to dismiss the easier forms of learning.

Like the rest of us, I believe that it is each person’s right to make his or her own mistakes. Still, one cannot help but wonder if such an attitude isn’t merely egoism overriding intellect; for certainly there are some things that we should take as irrefutable despite not having lived them.

Such was the case with Carley.

I have never met Carley though I had seen her picture and read her story in the newspaper of a town in which I was living at the time. I was also privy to progress updates when my sister-in-law, who is licensed therapist, began working with her three times a week. Carley’s mother was also a physical therapist but for ethical reasons she did not treat her daughter.

On a sultry July evening several years before, Carley accepted a ride from a young man she barely knew. He was driving a very red, very flashy, very fast Camaro and Carley, like so many of her peers, enjoyed taking that occasional chance. Mortality was something that happened only to other people.

Moments later, with the accelerator mashed to the floor, the driver lost control, and the car went airborne before flipping several times. Paramedics arriving at the scene found the young man beyond resuscitation. Carley, barely alive, lay pinned beneath one wheel of the ton-and-a-half vehicle.

As is so often the case, seatbelts had been regarded as an automotive frivolity.

At the hospital, her family was told to prepare for the worst. Doctors held little hope as she slipped into a deep coma and, considering the severe neurological trauma she had sustained, the word ‘vegetative’ was mentioned more than once.

But with that undefined and inexorable faith possessed only by religious ascetics and parents, Carley’s mother refused to accept this prognosis. Every day she sat at her child’s bedside talking, reading unheard stories to an unresponsive form. Carley was sixteen when she stepped into the Camaro and seventeen when she woke up. She had missed both her birthday and Christmas.

Miraculously, the cognitive side of her mind was undamaged. She thought clearly and logically, though still like a teenager. She recovered some motion in her left hand and leg. Eventually, she began laughing again and speaking very slowly in an extremely soft voice.

But the path to recovery is a long one scattered with small, hard-won victories. Three more years went by, and she realized that she had forfeited nearly half of her ‘fun’ adolescent years for a few moments of excitement.

Carley’s is a story laden with lessons. There are the lessons inherent in her ongoing personal struggle to regain control over her body, a control that is granted to us freely, but only once. Subsequently, we must earn it. There is the lesson of a mother’s defiant courage in the face of medical advice that suggested she suspend hope. Carley’s mother continued to ‘ride herd’ on her daughter’s treatment, bullying reluctant insurance companies, demanding the maximum from the administration of the rehab center where Carley stayed. There is also the lesson every parent from time immemorial has tried to instill in his or her child, the one that says simply “Think! Think before you do it!”

And finally, there is the cruelest lesson of all: that each of us must live with the consequences of the choices we make.

As the former original owner of an old but well-loved (white) Camaro, I count myself among the ‘blockheads’ mentioned above. When both the car and I were much younger and prone to independent, albeit foolish choices, we sometimes tested its mettle late at night on a desolate two-lane highway in the western part of the county where I was living. Caught up in the exhilaration of speed, I rarely considered the possible long-term aftermaths. And I never wore a seatbelt.

Though I still fiercely defend the right to free choice, I cannot avoid the frequent lump in my throat as I recall Carley whenever I turn an ignition key. While the spring in the shoulder harness was sprung from too many years in the Florida sun, I buckled up what remained of that safety restraint thankful that God or Fate or Kismet looked upon me benevolently in those days of my own extended childhood.

One need not be sixteen to make juvenile choices. But if we are given the chance to witness the results of such decisions and still refuse to learn from the costly errors of others, then we have become irrevocably mired in puerile behavior. Tragedy is not something we need to aspire to sample on a personal basis. The Carleys of this world have already done that for us.

If only we will listen and learn from what we hear.

Raised in the grittiness of New York City, Brittingham spent a large segment of her adult years in the blue skies and humidity of South Florida. Today she resides along the magnificent (and sometimes tumultuous) shores of Lake Michigan. Author of three novels, she has also published essays in the Hartford Courant; short stories in Florida Literary Foundation’s hardcover anthology, Paradise; in the 1996 Florida First Coast Writers’ Festival, and in Britain’s World Wide Writers. Recently published in WELL READ Magazine Aug. 2023 was the essay “Feed the Beast” and in the Dec. 2023 issue “Judas Season.” “Something of Significance” has appeared in Culture Cult Magazine. Poetry has appeared in Kitchen Sink Magazine, the ocean waves, Words for the Earth, the Crone’s Words, Green Shoe Sanctuary, Halcyon Days, The Emblazoned Soul Literary Review, Dear You-Poems Through the Heart, Culture Cult, About Time Anthology, and the Writers’ Journal.