Column: Tales from Exit 22, by Al Batt

“My cousin is failing,” my mother said somberly.

“I’ll bet it’s in math class,” I added. The voice of experience.

My mother gave me an odd look.

She did that often. She’d have thought my comment peculiar if she hadn’t known me all my life.

Her cousin wasn’t failing a math class. Life had been handling him roughly. He was dying.

Using that definition of “failing,” we all fail.

It might be called an epic failure.

Each and every one of us will buy the farm, kick the bucket, take a dirt nap, shuffle off this mortal coil, give up the ghost, assume room temperature, expire, bite the dust, succumb, croak, cash in on one’s chips, perish or join the choir invisible. Most do this before being able to memorize the Gettysburg Address.

I listened to an Olympic athlete being interviewed on the radio. His contributions consisted primarily of excuses for his failure to garner a medal. His excuses were lost on most listeners. We all fail, but he made it to the Olympics. That’s pretty successful. He ought to try fishing or golf.

“What we’ve got here is failure to communicate” is a quotation from the 1967 movie, “Cool Hand Luke,” spoken first by Strother Martin (as the Captain, a prison warden) and later by Paul Newman (as Luke, a prisoner). It’s usually, incorrectly, stated as “What we’ve got here is a failure to communicate.”

We all fail to communicate.

I was eating at the Cottage Cafe, a fine eatery in Amboy, when the “Candyman” arrived. He is so named because he offers various kinds of candy to all he encounters.

The Candyman enjoys riddles, tricks and puzzles.

He placed a penny on the table and then added two legs, one of three pennies and another of four, branching from the initial coin. There were eight pennies that were arranged, thanks to the sharing of the first cent, in one row of four coins and another of five.

The Candyman issued his challenge. The “Mission Impossible” theme might have played in the background. Move only one penny only one time to make two rows of five coins.

The solution was to take the last penny in the row of five and place it on top of the initial penny put on the table. Voila! Two rows of five.

Not everyone could solve this puzzle. That’s a minor failure, but still a failure.

I watched a basketball game. It was a good game, close from the opening tip. It was so exciting, it caused me to leave the comfort of my rock-hard bleacher seat numerous times to stand and cheer.

A technical foul was called on a coach. The player from the other team shot two free throws. She made one and missed one. Her team won by a single point. The other team lost due to the technical foul. A technical foul is a failure in more ways than one.

I’m not a failurstatician, but it’s easy to check sports statistics. There are more numbers available than make good sense.

Baseball is crammed with failure. Bunts and hit-and-runs produce far more failure than success. For every team that wins, one loses. That’s a 50 percent failure rate.

Harmon Killebrew, an incredibly popular Minnesota Twin player, hit 573 home runs, but struck out 1699 times. Larry Bird, a Boston Celtic basketball Hall-of-Famer, made .496 percent of his field goal attempts. That’s a lot of failures by a couple of great successes.

A neighbor boy was walking while wearing only one shoe.

“Lose a shoe?” I asked.

“Nope. Found one.”

What I thought was a failure, he considered a success.

I failed a guacamole survey at church. They said there were no right or wrong answers, just right or wrong participants. I was the wrong kind and was booted from the survey.

Like chronic gamblers, we have streaks when nothing goes wrong. Then we have streaks when nothing goes right.

We all have wanted to give up and proclaim, “I’ve accomplished nothing! My high school guidance counselor was right!”

I hope your counselor was wrong. Hope keeps us going.

Hope is the ability to envision a future in which we wish to participate.

Cheer up. You could never fail as often as Wile E. Coyote.

Charles Kettering said, “It doesn’t matter if you try and try and try again, and fail. It does matter if you try and fail, and fail to try again.”

I say let an old joke be your guide, “If at first you don’t succeed, skydiving might not be for you.”

 

Hartland resident Al Batt’s columns appear every Wednesday and Sunday.