In the early 1990s I worked in youth ministry at a church in southern California and one way we paid for our yearly events was by setting up to sell Christmas trees. It was a big affair and required someone to spend the night in a drafty 1970s travel trailer overnight as a caretaker. It was cold on the wet lawn, in the way 50° California can be in December.
I was working one evening and some hoodlums from the area came to the lot, demanding a free tree. I shook my head and said no. The leader nodded and said “OK, gringo, we’ll be back to kill you tonight.” This is a neighborhood I’d grown up in and the Mexican gangs were no joke at all, in fact they had earlier stabbed to death one of the guys from my church.
What did I do? I sharpened the hatchets we used to trim the tree trunks, practiced throwing them against the telephone poles providing temporary site power, arrayed the rebar-built tree bases into snare lines with the sharp points in a ring around the trailer covered by trimmed foliage. The only thing missing was the A-Team theme playing in the background.
I cranked up the feeble space heater in the trailer and crawled into my sleeping bag. Cue the drum line because man, I was ready for war!
Morning came and I was alive so I set off for coffee and to get cleaned up for my computer programming job across town.
A few days later I relayed this account to a former high school teacher and Vietnam vet. He quietly shook his head as I explained my meticulous defensive preparations.
“You were just playing around. If you were serious, you would have gone home.” Insert that sound of a record needle scratch. What? Wait, I was what?
It took a while to sink in but he was exactly right. I was playing around, being the action hero in a false creation of my mind where I would win the encounter. As if John Wick met the Home Alone kid.
Why am I writing this? After over 30 years I have returned to that simple intellectual test that my teacher had offered: am I just playing around?
In all the resilience talk on this blog, are we still just playing around?
Or are we taking it seriously enough to go home and up the odds in our favor even when it doesn’t have the glamor of a contrived 1980s action movie.
Your call.