I’m Fixing to Make a List of All the Things I Wish I Hadn’t Ever Done

I’m fixing to make a list of all the things I wish I hadn’t ever done.

Trouble is, there’s just not enough room in the paper, much less this column, to get it all in. So I suppose I’ll just have to condense it down some. At first I thought about doing the top 10, which is traditional in story telling, but my valuable space is limited so I’ll just have to go with the top five.

I wish I hadn’t of bought that brown Pinto station wagon in 1975. It turned out to be the Mother of all Lemons. It wasn’t long after I had to replace the transmission, until it needed a valve job. The tires must have been made out of plastic because they were worn down to the rims after 8,000 miles. I finally paid a guy $500 just to take up the payments.

I wish I hadn’t ever picked up that hitchhiker right outside of Little Rock on that cold and rainy night in 1981. She was standing there at the freeway entrance with a guitar case and her thumb out. Besides feeling sorry for her, I figured I could use a little company on the way to Memphis, and, who knew, she might even do some picking for me.

About 50 miles down the road, in the middle of nowhere, she did some picking all right, she picked me cleaner than a hound’s tooth. It turned out she was packing something other than a guitar in that case, and I was the one who ended up hitchhiking to Memphis.

I wish I hadn’t of caught that late flight to San Juan in 1995. If I would have waited until the next morning and taken the early flight everything would have been fine, but I was anxious to get there and get my work done so I could grab a little beach time.
I don’t know why, but it seems the passengers on late-night flights always include a few strange folks.

In this particular case it was a Latin singer by the name of Miguelina, in the seat next to mine. If it hadn’t of been this quirk of fate I would have never—uh, you know what, at this point I think it would be better for everyone concerned if I just moved on to number four.

I wish I hadn’t bought those bank stocks in 2007. At first it looked like I was going to make a killing after I got them at $40 a share and they zoomed up to fifty. But then I painfully watched as they dropped back to my purchase price, and then dropped like a rock down to seven dollars a share.

As far as number five on my list, I wish I had been fixing to keep my mouth shut about number three.