The Wrong Figures

By Barbara Elliott Carpenter

When I was nineteen, I thought that I knew exactly what I wanted to do with my life. I was engaged to a twenty-one-year-old young man, whom I had been dating for over three years; and we were planning a wedding. We truly loved each other.

Then doubts began to wiggle their way into my thinking, and I started to wonder if I were making the right decision. A college scholarship was available, if I wanted to apply for it. I was a good student, ranking in the upper ten percent of my senior class. I had half-heartedly considered pursuing a career in the fields of art or writing. I possessed a measure of talent in both areas, but I had lacked incentive to really work at either of them. And that's where the doubts began.

Without telling my fiance, I struggled for weeks with my dilemma. I knew that I could not go away to college and still get married. I also knew that my heart belonged to him, would always belong to him. I tried to count the cost of both losses, tried to project what my life would be like in both scenarios. I was in a flood of indecision.

Late one night, as I tossed and turned, I heard my dad cough lightly from the next room. He was only thirty-nine; but he was very ill with lupus, and had many sleepless, pain-filled nights.

"Dad, is Mom asleep?" I called softly.

"Yes," he answered.

"Daddy, I have a problem," I told him. For a long time, there was no answer; and I thought that he had fallen asleep. He was a man of few words, at best. So I resigned myself to receiving no help from that quarter.

"Maybe you're using the wrong figures."

When his answer floated gently into my room, it was as if a cartoon light bulb appeared over my head. How simple my father had made it. All I had to do was eliminate one set of figures from the equation, and my problem was solved!

A few weeks later I married my young man. And, no, it hasn't always been a "happily-ever-after" fairy tale existence. It has been, however, a life filled with love, even in the midst of "dislike" for each other. Untold riches have been mine, through the lives of my daughter and my son, and now through the lives of their children.

Down all the years, I have used my "talents" in art projects for my children, both at school and church, as a means to decorate my own house and houses of friends and relatives with my own oil paintings, and my years of association with a writer's roundtable, both with writing content and designing covers for our books. I have finally seen another of my dreams materialize in the form of my first book, which will be released in May, 2003.

My young dad died just two short years after giving me the words I needed to make the correct choice for my life. My daughter, the only grandchild he would ever hold, was only seven months old when he died.

I wish my dad could know how often I have used his one-line philosophy. I have discovered that, usually, when confronted with a choice or problem or dilemma, the easiest solution is simply to delete one set of "figures" from the equation.

It works for me!