Hope for the future
On Friday evening, around 5:00, my doorbell rang, which is unusual enough in itself. We don't usually get unexpected visitors, and our neighborhood is quiet enough that anybody unexpected is usually selling something, and there are few enough of those. So I was a bit surprised when I answered the door to a sheepish-looking teenager. He said he'd accidentally backed his car into my mailbox, and was very sorry, and did I want to come out and inspect it? He explained that he'd been backing out of the driveway across the street (the neighbors' kids are too young to drive, so maybe he's a cousin, or a family friend), overshot, and bumped my mailbox, which isn't too surprising...I've come close to bumping their trash cans on occasion. He said he thought he'd just tapped it, but when he got home, he noticed the paint on his SUV was scratched, so he thought he'd better come back and tell me.
The mailbox door wouldn't shut anymore, but I wasn't terribly worried about that. I didn't really feel like fixing it at dinnertime on Friday evening, but I had no doubts that I could (and it only took about five minutes on Saturday morning, in fact). The kid looked kind of upset, and offered to pay for the damages, but I declined. I thanked him for his honesty, and told him not everyone would have taken responsibility like that.
I know it's possible that he banged my box, and took off for home, where his Dad saw the scratches, read him the riot act, and ordered him to come back here and apologize. That happened to me at least once when I was his age. But I'm going to engage in some unaccustomed optimism and choose to believe he did it on his own. So no harm, no foul, and it was a pretty good antidote to the stories about teenagers on the news lately.
The mailbox door wouldn't shut anymore, but I wasn't terribly worried about that. I didn't really feel like fixing it at dinnertime on Friday evening, but I had no doubts that I could (and it only took about five minutes on Saturday morning, in fact). The kid looked kind of upset, and offered to pay for the damages, but I declined. I thanked him for his honesty, and told him not everyone would have taken responsibility like that.
I know it's possible that he banged my box, and took off for home, where his Dad saw the scratches, read him the riot act, and ordered him to come back here and apologize. That happened to me at least once when I was his age. But I'm going to engage in some unaccustomed optimism and choose to believe he did it on his own. So no harm, no foul, and it was a pretty good antidote to the stories about teenagers on the news lately.