The Mystery of the Stolen Ladder: Learning to Let it Go

It was 1958 and I was in the third grade. We must have been outside for morning recess, and it was probably early in the fall of that year, because I still remember it being warm and sunny outside. It was the first school day for my new white sneakers. Why that is momentous at all is that I can still remember how pissed I was at Chuck, one of my friends then, when he walked up to me and said, “Nice shoes!” Then he stomped on them and got them both dirty, before I had a split second to move or make a protest. I was so angry, frustrated, and felt so betrayed, and it’s a resentment that, obviously, I still have today, almost 45 years later.

You would think that I could have dumped that resentment a long time ago, but I haven’t, though at least today I realize how silly it is to remember it all so well. I mean, it’s not all my fault that we went off to college and careers and I haven’t ran into Chuck since 1971. I know he’s a dentist somewhere.

We all happen to be wronged by some random, annoying events throughout our lives, the lady who cuts into our lane and then tries to make a left turn, or the paperboy who tosses the paper into the little pond next to our front door each morning. And it’s those minor, or major, assaults to our pride that can really get just under our skin at times, especially when we feel we have no recourse or revenge for these supposed wrongdoings. These resentments do seem to gather into our own personal “mental collections” over time, and they probably serve little good for us, because they can build and resurface over and over again in our daily lives, and really sour our days.

Friends and counselors might recommend to us to just “let it go”, that is, to try to resolve these supposed wrong-doings or at least push them aside at times. “Letting it go” can help to take some of the weight off of our backs and thus better enable us to enjoy life as life occurs, contrasted to constantly re-living, day after day, all the harmful things we think we’ve been through.

Last spring was when my son was helping with the high school prom, and he happened to take my ladder to school to use it there. A few days after the prom, he was visibly upset as he came to me to say that one of the other parents mistakenly had taken our ladder home with him. I tried to be nice and forgiving about it, believing that we could simply call up this parent and get him to drop the ladder off here at our house. But as it happened, this parent turned out to be an active alcoholic that we know and we came to realize, after a few phone calls to him, that we weren’t going to get our ladder back without a fight.

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