Take a snowy white sheet of A4 paper. Place a spot on it. Not in the exact middle, but somewhere less noticeable. In an extreme corner, perhaps. Hand the paper to a friend. Ask them what they notice. Ten to one, they’ll pick the spot.
A former teacher colleague used to use this as an example to indicate to his pupils how our minds are conditioned to overlook the unblemished ‘niceness’ (in a person) in favour of the stain.
There are many conciliatory sayings — let bygones be bygones; forgive and forget — but it doesn’t appear to be easy to ‘get past the blemish’. At least, with most people. Shakespeare said it best, albeit in an extreme sense: ‘The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones’.
Recently, I had the rare chance to converse with two sets of parents, separately, whose sons had each, in their teens, crashed the family car.
Ho hum, I hear some readers (who are parents) say, what’s new about that? Lots of parents have had a child, at some stage in their teens, drive the family car out in pristine condition and drive it back (or have it driven back by the towing company) in unrecognisable guise. The point I’m making is that ‘our children and our crashed cars’ is a topic of discussion one can instantly identify with. At the end of the day we are all, as parents, grateful if our ‘car bruising’ children manage to escape uninjured.
But it is how Marge and Terry Jones, and Amanda and George Sumner, as parents, dealt with their respective sons’ crashes that interested me. Both lost heavily on insurance. Both cars were write-offs. And both said they were incredibly relieved to see their boys — Vince and William — escape with their lives.
Vince suffered a broken arm and cuts to the face from shards of shattered windscreen. William incurred whiplash and had to wear a neck brace for a whole year. And there the similarity ended. It appears as though Marge and Terry never allowed Vince to forget his misdemeanour.
“Marge nagged him every single day,” said Terry.
“I just didn’t want him to push it to the back of his mind and forget,” countered Marge, adding, “I wanted him to be mindful of the fact that he’d got away with his life this time, and he might not be so lucky again.”
Did the Jones’s get another car?
“Oh, absolutely not,” stressed Marge, “Terry had friends who gave him a lift to work and back every day. I just learned to take the bus into town and back.”
It shouldn’t surprise anyone that Vince, now a married man with a young son of his own (and another car crash waiting to happen, as my prankster friend Barney put it in private), didn’t drive a car again. Not even when he was offered a company car, as part of the perks of his job.
A psychologist friend once told me that when you take an isolated folly and turn it into something catastrophic, you’re creating a millstone that could be worn around the neck for the rest of one’s life sometimes. The trick, as parents, is to put the matter to bed. Easier said than done. When your child emerges from a serious crash with a serious injury — whiplash — but his life otherwise intact, it’s hard to contemplate buying another car and, as soon as the young man has recovered and his neck brace removed, offering him the keys to ‘take another ride’.
But as George Sumner told me, “William was always going to be extra careful, extra vigilant after the accident. The boy had already learned his lesson. He knew he’d got away with his life. It wasn’t necessary for us to keep reminding him of that.”
To me, that was so akin to ‘looking past the black spot on the white page’.
Kevin Martin is a journalist based in Sydney, Australia.
