Wrongly Accused, Yet We Can Still Think Happy And Be Happy Elita Sohmer Clayman

I heard an interesting comment. It was “Even Da Vinci stopped painting sometimes, he took time out too.” Then another comment was “Keep on trying and think happy to be happy.” Put the two together and you get “You have to stop sometimes from what you are doing, then you keep on trying again and when you think happy thoughts, you will be happy.”

How we do that is up to ourselves. When we hear something that someone says, it could be on the national news, the local news, online newspapers or an actual newspaper delivered to our door; it is how we interpret what we heard. Sometimes, we interpret things the way we want it to be or think of it differently than was said.

Many years ago, I was coming home from visiting my Mom and I had my young daughter with me. A man pulled out from the street he was parked on, hit my car, got out and said he was sorry. We exchanged insurance information and when it came time for his insurance to pay me for the damage; he said I hit him. The way it happened, it was decided in my favor, he hit me. The lawyer asked him at the small type of trial about it, why did you change your mind and say she hit you. There was no way where the damage occurred, I could have hit him. He was an older man at that time and he said very sarcastically “I tried to get away with it, because she had a small child with her and I was going to say she was distracted with the child and so it was her fault and I am in the clear.”

The lawyers on both sides could not believe that someone would admit something like that so casually and think he would get off of this dastardly stunt. Longfellow said “something attempted, something done.” This is what he thought he could get away with by blaming a young woman with a child and blaming the child for distracting her. He got fined; some points on his record and a lashing by the judge as to his lack of decency and his trying to blame the victim. It was over quickly and the judge told him to never ever try to get away with something so vicious as to charge someone else with his screw ups.

He interpreted what happened in his sick mind and figured I would be judged for negligence in driving with a child and he would go free because he was the older person in the accident. People are evil to put something on someone else who is completely innocent and even in those days of  1963, without computers, without cameras on traffic lights and without digital cameras to film it immediately, he thought he would interpret it his way and surely be ruled the victim and the injured party.

We have to interpret things as they are and not as we want it to be. In football games, they have instant replay and it can be seen immediately if something is ruled wrong by the officials. Sometime when they review it, the announcers watching the game as it happened are even amazed at what is seen on the film. The truth is the truth, whether seen on a video replay or even in your mind. The truth is supposed to always win out, though sometimes it does not.

Many years ago, I was at a dance competition in New Jersey. The dance judges are many times extremely tough on the professional part of the dance team, when one person is the amateur trying for an award for her or his dancing. He or she is dancing with his or her coach and the event is called Pro-am. Pro for the professional teacher and am for the amateur student. Judges see things the couple is doing and the pro is responsible for any wrong steps used in the dance event. There are rules stating what steps can be performed in certain events. The judge saw something he thought was out of line, actually steps from a higher dance level and he did something I had never seen before. He called out while the other couples were dancing in the same event, that Mr. Tony and his partner, number 129 (all males wear numbers pinned on the back side of their dance outfit to identify who they are and are dancing with at that time) are to stop dancing. He said “Mr. Tony of the Maryland dance studio name of (I shall leave it blank) is to go off the dance floor for dancing improper levels of the designated dance.” No one had ever heard a judge do that vocally, what they usually do, is let the couple finish and then just put down bad and low marks on the judging sheets. They may speak with Mr. Tony later on in private to tell him they are quite dissatisfied with his performance as a professional person.

The judge, just one out of five viewing that particular event, really should not have said nor done that. The other judges perceived the same thing that Mr. Tony was attempting and they kept their silence and silently marked him off and down and that was as it should have been accomplished.  Mr. Tony either did the advanced steps in the lower dance to show off his student or he innocently did it without realizing his mistake. The teachers or coaches have many people to dance with in these competitions, and it probably is difficult sometimes to distinguish a mistake in a level of dance.
 

The judge I heard afterwards through the dance grapevine, he, was called down by the higher authority judges and he was told, he went about it in the wrong way. He wanted to think that his way of embarrassing the professional was the proper way of correcting a mistake or he just wanted to show off to the other judges that he was superior to them and catching this. His defaming and degrading the teacher only showed his ignorance of the rules and made him, the judge, look disgraced rather than the teacher Mr. Tony.

Sometimes, it is kinder and softer, to perform your duties with thought beforehand. My Dad had a terrible thing happen to him, when he was the victim and not the one doing the thing. There was a traffic ticket issued and my Dad’s license number was put down in error. He went to the motor vehicles building, explained everything to them and they said it would be taken care of. One evening, the police came to the house and wanted to take Dad down to the station for not appearing for the trial. He offered what he had done, even gave the name of the person who took his information and since there were no computers in those days, they said they found no confirmation of what he told them. Luckily, he had a confirming number and still they did not listen to him. They wanted to handcuff this kind man of about fifty nine and to make it worse; it was the beginning night of a very religious Jewish holiday. He begged the policeman to listen to him and still they escorted him out in the fall evening into a police car. Mom immediately called his cousin who was a well-known lawyer; he met Dad down there and straightened everything out whereas Dad was the victim, not the person who had done wrong in this ticket case. No one ever apologized to Dad and he felt very embarrassed because all the neighbors in the row houses of our neighborhood thought Dad had done something bad. It was a terrible few hours and an undeserved event due to carelessness in handwriting of the original ticket. He finally did get a letter in the mail, because his cousin, the lawyer persevered it be sent, stating their apology in doing this to him. Dad in his unique way showed it to all the neighbors who had witnessed his “going in a police car” that holiday night and everyone was sorry it had happened to such a fine man.

The neighbors had interpreted what they saw in Dad being led away on a holiday night or any night, quite wrongly. The whole episode was ugly and inaccurate and it shows what can happen to innocent people because a clerk typed in the incorrect numbers of the driver’s license.

Dad kept on in his always “think happy, be happy” manner after this incident and even made a joke about it, saying it happened, because he did not want to fast for twenty-four hours on this fasting holiday in the Jewish New Year called Yom Kippur. It was no joke and even the dance judge calling someone down in the obnoxious manner he did, was no joke.

 
So even Da Vinci who took time out and did not paint for a while, knew he interpreted for himself that sometimes a timeout is necessary for any profession. The police department needed a big time out when Dad took the day off from work in the first place to tell them it was neither his license number nor his accident. The man who hit a young woman and her child needed more than one timeout to pull him into an honest mode and to confess up to his wrongdoings.

We have to take a timeout sometimes and do the proper and appropriate action for the event that just happened and even if we are at fault, we should own up to it and not jeopardize other peoples’ lives.

This proves we are decent folks who can live up to the old adage “honesty is the best policy.” In this endeavor, we prove to ourselves, we are honorable and that is extremely important when we sit down and think of what kind of person we are and want to be. Then we will think happy and we will be happy.