hapless ones

I was thinking today about a guy I knew in high school....a really nice guy, completely quiet, the nerdy type...someone you didn't pay a heck of a lot of mind to, but who was just always there and always, well, nice. He was like a big, gentle giant....but a giant with an IQ of maybe 180.

But the thing was, this extraordinarily nice guy always just seemed to have things happen to him. Take his valedictorian speech, for example. He had to stand up in front of about five thousand people, a feat that completely awed me. I remember watching him up there on graduation day, wondering how on earth such a reticent person--a person, indeed, from whom I had never heard more than twenty words at a time--could possibly deliver a speech to so many people. I was really impressed. Wow, I thought....Jung must have a lot more to him than I ever guessed.

And then a gust of wind came, and all his little note cards fluttered away.

I remember an incredulous, horrified silence, as five thousand people sat up there in the bleachers and watched Jung standing down below, wondering what to do or say without his little note cards. No one laughed.

Except me, of course. My eyes were bugging out and I had tears streaming down my face, I was trying so hard to suppress the giggles. It was just so, well, so like him. Because that was Jung. Like I said, things just happened to him.

Jung's big claim to fame was being the one who accidentally ran over the bearded fat lady who ran our driver's training courses. She was a horror: one of those people who has so little power in life normally that lording it over a bunch of terrified high school students really was the cat's miaow. There wasn't much to our driver's training course--basically we just drove around a bunch of little golf carts in the parking lot, practicing how to stop and wave hand signals at people. It would have been very baby-ish and silly, were not for the bearded fat lady, who actually made the class into something you could fail. In fact, this was the one course that could keep you from graduating, not because it was hard, but because she was a jerk, and she really enjoyed the thought that she could single-handedly ruin our lives....at least, for a semester.

But then Jung ran over her.

It could only have been Jung. Anyone else and you would have thought it was deliberate. But not Jung. And of course it wasn't his fault; not really. The gas peddle on his golf cart got stuck. He lost control; the car veered wildly; the bearded fat lady waved her arms at him irritably and told him to get back in his lane.

And Jung ran over her and broke both her legs.

It was very sad, in that extraordinarily satisfying kind of way you can only truly experience as a high school student. I remember hearing about it next day at school--it was all over the school, of course. "Jung ran over the bearded fat lady! Did you hear? Jung ran over the lady with the beard!"

And Jung wouldn't say a word. He was, inexplicably, quite upset about the whole thing.

But I am grateful to him, because I'd put off that class, and put it off, and put it off--three times, in fact, since I'd turned sixteen and was originally supposed to take it. Finally, in my final semester of high school, I was able to take and pass driver's training, because the bearded fat lady was recuperating in the hospital.

It was awesome.