To this day, I have never spoken to my father about the incident I describe in this post, but I thought about the incident described below this morning when I read the First Read from NBC News newsletter in my inbox.
To set context for the actual incident, I need to explain that I was a spoiled brat in college. I admit this freely - now - but at the time, I probably resisted the idea more than I should have. What happened was that when I was a sophomore in college, I was grounded for eating leftover pizza. I found this leftover pizza in my parent's refrigerator. But that wasn't my only crime. I had played my drums in their basement as well. Because I was a spoiled brat, I didn't have to pay for any of my college tuition. I also lived in a dorm room that was about a 10 minute drive from my parent's house - where my father still lives to this day. I had a routine that worked great for me. Except for socks and underwear, my mommy washed my clothes. I brought it home on a Monday or Tuesday and picked up my clean clothes on a Wednesday or Thursday. Since my Ludwig Vistalite drums were set up in the basement of my parent's house, I made it a point to either drop off or pick up my laundry when I knew I had at least a few minutes to sit down behind them and play. As I said, I was spoiled.
So, in that context, in the spring semester of 1990, I went to my parent's house to either drop off or pick up my laundry. I played drums for a bit and then realized I was hungry. I went upstairs and looked in the refrigerator. There was leftover frozen pizza. It looked good so I ate it. Then I went back up to my dorm. Early the next morning, my father called me. The only details I remember about that phone conversation are that I was in trouble and I needed to be home by 4:00 that day. During that conversation, I didn't think about or mention that I actually had a class until 4:00. After that class, I drove home - it was about a 10 minute drive from dorm to home. I remember that as I turned the door handle to walk into the house, I heard my father say, "I told him to be home by 4:00."
The gist of the situation was that my brother had gotten in trouble for something - I don't even remember for what - and as he was getting reprimanded, he threw me under the bus by defending his actions by stating that I had been home playing drums and eating pizza. The "eating pizza" phrase is what had made my father upset with me. In an emotional tone of voice, he pointed out that he was already paying for me to eat up in the college cafeteria and that if I was then coming home and eating, it was like throwing money out the window. As he made that point, he got up from his chair, opened our sliding glass back door, opened up his wallet, extracted some dollars, and threw them out the window.
Because of this episode, eating leftover frozen pizza, I was grounded from using the car I was driving at the time. At the end of our conversation, I began to walk back up to college. I had a class at 5:20 and when I started walking, it was around 5:00. After a few yards of walking, I realized I would never be able to walk back to my dorm and still make it to class so I turned around and asked if I could have a ride back up to school because I had class.
My father got up and we drove up to my dorm. It was on Glass Road, going down the big hill by the Northwood Apartments, when I mustered up the nerve to speak. I told my father that it didn't do any good to yell at me. Without hardly any pause, he replied, "When I don't, you don't listen." Every time I am in Cedar Rapids and drive down that hill, I think about that conversation and his words to me that day.
All of this is to provide context for the latest development in politics. It is relevant because adults are acting like my brother did when he was being reprimanded. Instead of taking responsibility for his actions, he pointed at me and said, "What about what he did? Why am I the only one getting in trouble?" In my First Read from NBC News newsletter, I read this:
Two wrongs don't make a right
The two big political stories over the past week -- Hillary's emails and that Iran letter -- have led to partisans saying, "Well, the other side does it, too!!!" as one of us recently noted in a Facebook post. Case in point: Hillary Clinton's defenders have argued that Jeb Bush has his own private server, and that Scott Walker had his own email system in Wisconsin. But do those practices mean that Clinton's personal email use is OK? The other example: Republicans contend that the GOP's letter to Iran's leaders is justified because Nancy Pelosi went to Syria in 2007, and because ex-Rep. David Bonior went to Baghdad in 2002 to protest in the impending Iraq war. But when did two wrongs make a right? If you criticized said behavior in the past, you can't turn around and use it to justify your current behavior. It's no wonder that 90% of the country thinks Washington is looking out for its own partisan interest.
While it's too early to describe how the political turmoil is going to play out, the epilogue to being grounded for eating pizza is that on Friday of that week, there was a message from my father on my answering machine. As I've described previously, I had an answering machine that used a cassette and I routinely dubbed my messages onto a separate cassette for preservation so if I were to find the cassette in my boxes of cassettes and listen to it, I would hear my father say that my car was up in the parking lot of the Hennessy building and that I could do with it what I want. The next message was from my mother who wanted to be sure that I had gotten the message about my car from my father and wondered if I could call to confirm that I had. I sometimes wonder what the conversation between my parents was like immediately preceding my father calling and leaving that message. As I said at the beginning of this post, I've never asked. I don't think it really matters.
