After ten years as a homeowner I finally got around to cleaning out the shed yesterday. Some of the junk I pulled out of the shed belonged to the previous owner of the house. I put these items - a barbecue grill and an office chair - on the curb for the metal scavengers who troll the neighborhood. I also set out my son's old tricycle.
My wife woke me at a quarter of six this morning to tell me that the items I had put on the curb were in the middle of the street. I went outside to put them back. The barbecue grill had been tipped over and pieces of charcoal were in the street. I ran over some of them when I moved my car to block the items. I wanted to make it harder for the vandals to do it again.
When I got back inside my wife told me that she had been in the bathroom and could hear something being dragged and a girl laughing. My wife shook her head and wondered why anyone would do something like that.
"It's Karma." I told her.
"Oh God, John. What did you do?" She asked.
I told her about my visit to my uncle's dairy farm in Wisconsin in the late summer of 1976 or 1977. I was about fifteen or sixteen. My cousin, my uncle's oldest son, was a month younger than I. One night my cousin and I went out after dark. The corn in the field was getting tall. We uprooted several stalks of corn and stood them up in a line across the county road that ran along the cornfield. We saw the headlights of a car when we had the cornstalks lined up across one lane.
We headed for the ditch and waited. The car came to a stop and the driver started yelling and cursing in case whoever pulled the prank was still within earshot. We stayed quiet as long as we could, but when the guy continued to yell and curse we both broke out laughing and had to run through the cornfield for the house.
That was one of the biggest laughs of my laugh. It took almost 40 years for me to pay for it. Karma takes its own sweet time.
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