REDEMPTION

We hear so much, these days, about our trouble teenagers. I don't think you can turn on the television without hearing some horror story somewhere. If it's not what's happening to them, it's what they're doing. And each of us, at one point or another, grimaces and thinks to ourselves, "You know, when I was a kid...."

Well, today I got a surprise. A surprise that came in the form of a mailbox left shattered at the end of my driveway...

My handy-man arrived early this morning, standing at my door with the remnants of my mailbox, the box itself smashed and dangling precariously off it's wooden platform. The post, which we surveyed street-side, was rammed so hard into the ground it took two hands to extricate. By the tire marks up on the curb and across the grass, it was obvious that someone had run it over. Run it over good enough that I was confident their car was in much worse shape than my beat-up mailbox.

We talked about my options, and he said he's come back later in the week to fix it up for me. And so it was forgotten.

Until about two hours later.

Answering the knock at my door, I sensed the reason for the strangers' visit before either of them spoke.

The mother looked slightly embarrassed, and braced for the worst. The daughter--the mailbox culprit, I assumed--stood behind her, arms crossed, head down. The mother began to explain while the daughter watched me tearfully.

"Are you OK?" I asked the girl.

She'd been reaching for her cell phone. She went off the road. She panicked--I would have too. She apologized. Apologized!

The mother apologized, too. She wanted to show her daughter the right thing to do.

I thought, "You know, when I was a kid...my father would have done the exact same thing!"

But I certainly never would have expected it in this day and age! A mother concerned enough to make time in her crazy "mother of three teenage drivers" schedule. A daughter brought up well enough to apologize without an ounce of huff or puff or defiance.

Before they left, the mother gave me her name and number and said she would reimburse me for whatever it cost to get a new mailbox. Honestly? The value of my little mailbox so pales in comparison to the value of the example she set for her daughter, and the example she set for me.

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