Life Matters, E.C.Nemeth [robert munsch read aloud .TXT] 📗

the biggest payday I ever had, before or since.
By this time the work was coming in and Farook was back helping me but was no longer my partner. I had work lined up for weeks ahead. It wasn't only contract work but service work as well. Things were looking pretty good.
Business blunder
Life slipped slowly by and in summer 2007 disaster struck. I had just closed two nice sized jobs and was just wrapping up another when the regulating body in charge of electrical safety and the licensing of electrical contractors disavowed all knowledge of me and my formally registered company. They even forgot my name when they corresponded by mail in the form of fines and fees. When I called they pretended to have absolutely no record of my existence. So when I tell them my story and give them my account number and tell them of the new permits I need for my up-coming jobs they tell me I am not a recognized contractor and that I must cease and desist all work immediately. Then, to make sure I complied, they sent their agents to my jobs and informed my customers about my situation and suggested they withhold any further payments and confiscate any tools or material left on the jobsite in lieu of money owed. This they did after four years as a registered contractor, after granting me dozens of permits. They changed the rules and I had the rug abruptly pulled out from under my feet.
I was devastated. I spent days in a blind rage, yelling and screaming and going round and round with the injustices visited upon me, past and present. Then I slept for three days straight.
After that I went into a deep depression. I could not see a way out. My usual fantasy of throwing everything into my car and just driving away to a new life in some other place wasn’t possible because I had no money and the fantasy didn’t include Val. And life without Val just didn’t appeal to me at all.
Just at my darkest hour, Paul, my teacher from Prac 1, called. Believe me, it was no coincidence. I wasn’t very friendly but did say how I felt about the sad state of the world. He said he missed me and that we should get together for coffee sometime. I said sure. We hung up but the connection remained open at another level. I know he sent me love and caring, forgiving thoughts.
In any case I reevaluated my present situation and applied the skills I had learned in Prac 1 to see I had only to follow the road laid open before me. I had work booked two weeks ahead, there was no immediate concern. So I pulled up my socks and went back to work after almost three weeks of chaotic emotional turmoil.
The Accident
About four or five months after the regulation changes in the electrical trade, I wrote this:
“So here I stand, on Thursday, January 24, 2008, at the crux of the situation yet again. I am balancing on a knife-edge. I know the familiar road well enough, and how it will eventually lead right back to this moment again in another form. What will I choose? I’ll let you know as it unfolds.”
The next night, Friday, January 25, 2008 at about 7:08 p.m., I got into a car accident. I was stopped in traffic on the highway and a lady behind me came around the bend talking on her cell phone, did not stop and rammed into me from behind. My car was a near write-off. I was alright but my back and neck were sore for a few weeks. Without a vehicle I did not know how I could survive. Not to mention that I was charged with driving without insurance. That is my second conviction and I was sure they would throw the book at me if I got caught again. Seemed like I was going to be made an example of yet again.
The point I wish to focus on is that I knew something was going to happen, that is how in tune I've become to this work and its repercussions. And also, that I am not looking at this incident as a disaster. Instead I await with bated breath the good that will inevitably come of this. This is a major turning point in my life. I knew it before it happened and now I will hold on to my faith that it will all turn out for the best.
Let me backtrack a bit. Friday at 4:00 p.m. I was waiting at the shop to talk to my boss, not having yet seen him since a nasty phone conversation earlier in the day about short hours that week, yet again (plus I wanted to pick up my pay check). After a lengthy wait I finally got to sit down with him. Oddly he begins recounting some highlights from his electrical career. Being in tune, I saw that we were linked in a relationship neither of us understood, but that was moving us as if we were puppets. I also intuited that my job was not in jeopardy, that in a strange way my boss was more impressed with me now than before. Impressed may be the wrong word: intimidated, fascinated, mesmerized all come to mind as alternates. In any case, the fact is I am an asset to any company when I am on my game, and I was single-mindedly focused on this particular job for this particular boss for personal reasons having to do with this work and the new beliefs I am slowly allowing into my reality. I was really shining. That is the reason that my boss now sat across from me at his desk, recounting his war stories. Behind the words our selves tested the other's position, assessing the potential for a mutually favorable resolution to our current impasse.
It took two hours of bantering banalities back and forth before a breakthrough came. My boss said, indirectly but still clearly enough for the intent to be relayed accurately, that he was impressed with my performance thus far, that more than a few times I had surprised him with my quality workmanship and electrical acumen. Then the topper: he said he needed me! He also said that he understood if I want to move on and find a job with more hours, but that he could not guarantee work he didn’t have. That’s when he admitted he needed me and didn’t want me to leave.
So, having hammered it out, it was agreed I would start back on the following Wednesday - to give me time to finish a side-job I was doing. Feeling good, I left the shop and went to the bank with my check. Then I got on the highway ... and ... BANG!
Coincidence? Bad-timing? Just two unrelated yet seriously major personal events happening by chance within minutes of each other? Shit Happens, right?
Bad Choices
Then the lessons. Minutes after the accident, tow trucks appeared. I admitted right away to those around that I had no insurance. A few minutes later another tow truck arrives. The first driver came over to say that this was his boss and that he was here to help me. The guy that just arrived came over and asked me to back my car up so he could hook up his dolly to my car. In shock, convinced some sort of roadside scam was underway I refused. The others came over and tried to persuade me but I would not relent. So the guy who had been sent to help me turned to the others and told them I had made my decision and there was nothing to do but wait for the cops.
Turns out the guy who raced from the shop to come help me was really trying to help me. Correction: he could have and would have helped me had I let him.
I want to add here that I had a glimpse, a momentary knowing, a revelation, involving the first tow truck driver. While we were mulling around in the sub-zero temperatures waiting for the police to arrive, for a moment this driver and I were alone. I commented that he must have seen some pretty horrible sights in his line of work. He glanced at me for a moment. I was shook by the haunted, frightened look in this man’s eyes. He looked away and said that it was a policy not to talk about such things, and walked away.
When our eyes met in that fleeting instant I suddenly saw those terrible sights for myself and I realized the tremendous strain the job entailed: waiting for highway carnage. I realized that these men were often the first to arrive and sometimes they could only offer solace and watch helplessly the inevitable unfolding of events. These men had an intimate knowledge of death and suffering. And they care, and really want to help, each and every time. They would have helped me had I let them, they had already convinced the other two involved in the accident to circumvent the insurance route and to settle amongst ourselves who pays what. But I stood in the way of my seeing it, seeing instead what I had made up and believed to be real.
I rode back to the pound with the guy sent to save me. At one point, he and I looked into each other’s eyes a moment and again I saw something. It was the truth I saw shining from this man. He told me he had had a heart attack a while back. And yet he still smoked, he said as he offered me one of his.
Why? Why would he tell me that? It is this dynamic that I wish to close on: The Truth.
Karma is nothing more than the truth enacted. Like begets like. If I choose to see what I have made then I will believe in what isn’t there, in truth. This requires a correction, which karma provides.
Conversely, if I am actively searching for truth, truth will find me. And I will see the truth and believe it.
My daughter arrived maybe twenty minutes after the accident. She and her boyfriend Thomas helped take all my tools, job related material and personal possessions out of the car. After we finished at the pound they drove me to my sister’s place and we stored my stuff there temporarily. On the drive back to my place across the top of Toronto on the 401Elysia’s boyfriend made a plea to correct my thinking. He cited the movie, The Secret, and said that our thoughts create our reality. If I think bad thoughts all the time, bad things will happen to me, he continued. He told me to think of all the good that comes from the bad if you only look for it. Like my daughter come to rescue me and Aaron, my nephew so worried about me. I thanked him for his concern and assured him I was actively involved in that very pursuit, as he well knows.
Again I was convinced this was another message for me from my higher self or some Cosmic Source, relayed through this one I thought is another.
I got home around 11:00 p.m. after the accident and after eating my supper that Val made me I got a call from John, my buddy. He was supposed to leave today for Colorado and begin his new life with his newly wed bride. But last night neither of us knew he wouldn’t be leaving the following day, that customs had found something in his record from back when he was a teen and refused him entry into the