![\"\"](\"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/10\/folding-chair.jpg\")
<\/p>\nLearned late, but learned.<\/p>\n
This is a post I might not normally make but after four days of not posting I thought I should let my readers know that I’m still kicking. Prepare yourself, today’s edition of Feathered Photography is long on text and short on photos and there’s nary a feather to be found.<\/p>\n
Yesterday was the six year anniversary of my daughter Shannon’s accident. For reasons that remain unknown she fell in her kitchen and struck her head on the marble floor resulting in a traumatic brain injury (TBI) that very nearly killed her. After six years she’s nearly fully recovered. Miraculously her only remaining symptoms are some minor short term memory loss and a small change in personality. And Shannon would be the first to admit that the personality tweak wasn’t necessarily a bad thing.<\/p>\n
I think it’s fair to say that when these anniversaries come up the family looks at them as something to celebrate. We’re not celebrating her accident of course, but her recovery. When the ER doctors tell your husband and son that you have “zero chance of surviving the night” but you’re still around six years later – physically healthy, mentally alert and happy – it’s definitely something to celebrate.<\/p>\n
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Being Shannon’s father has been an adventure (understatement) and both of us have been learning from each other for decades. This last anniversary of a potentially deadly event has reminded me of a couple of life saving lessons that Shannon has taught me, directly and indirectly, over the years – one of them decades ago and the other one very recently. Telling those stories requires me to go into a little family history.<\/p>\n
In 1989 when Shannon was 16 and had recently got her drivers license I absolutely insisted that she wear a seat belt but I repeatedly caught her not wearing it, even though she tried to be sneaky about it – as a high school teacher I was very good at spotting “sneaky”.\u00a0 At the time her mother and I were divorced so Shannon wasn’t living with me and my influence over her was limited at best. Parents out there can imagine the tension resulting from such a situation.<\/p>\n
Finally, during one of those confrontations, Shannon said to me – “Dad, you don’t wear your seat belt so you’re a hypocrite for telling me I have to wear mine”. She was absolutely right. I hated wearing a seat belt so I’d never got into the habit (probably a leftover from my Montana farm days) but here I was telling her that she had to wear hers? So 16 year old Shannon and I made a deal – we promised each other to start wearing our seat belts, always. It didn’t take either one of us long to get into the habit and to this day we both feel almost naked without wearing our seat belt while driving. So we just don’t do it.<\/p>\n
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Another potentially life saving lesson from Shannon (at least indirectly) came only a few days ago when I hired a handyman named Robert to help me with some chores that I can no longer do because of my bad back. One of those chores was to install a new kitchen ceiling light and during the process Robert asked me to hold the fixture in place while he connected the wiring. Robert was standing on his own stool and asked me to get one of my own so I could reach high enough to hold the light close to the ceiling.<\/p>\n
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Robert was nothing short of aghast when I appeared with this old folding chair as my “stool”.<\/p>\n
That chair has a lot of history. For most of her growing up years Shannon lived mostly with her mother but by the time she was a freshman in high school she’d become such a handful she came to live with me. I had a desk in Shannon’s room for her to study and do her homework on but I didn’t have a chair she liked so her mother donated this one (it was new at the time). For the past 30 years I’ve been using it as a stool to do chores like painting and changing ceiling light bulbs. I’ve spent countless hours standing on it, especially while painting.<\/p>\n
When I started to get up on that chair, in exactly the same place it is in my kitchen in this photo, to help Robert hang the light his reaction was immediate and visceral. He said “Don’t<\/em> stand on that chair, get a real stool.” And then he told me the story of his father-in-law who was standing on a folding chair just like this one when it folded and collapsed on him, resulting in a TBI that he’s never recovered from. His brain damage is significant and permanent.<\/p>\n So I retrieved a real step stool from the garage and proceeded to help Robert install the light. And I thought of Shannon’s devastating TBI and realized how stupid I’ve been for over 30 years to stand on a chair whose very design is to fold up when pressure is applied to just the right (wrong) place.<\/p>\n And yes, I’m currently shopping for a well designed, compact but safe step stool to keep and use in the house.<\/p>\n Thank you Shannon, for helping to teach your old Dad another new trick.<\/p>\n Ron<\/p>\n <\/p>\n