Coulda, woulda, shoulda?

Old Erne teetered on the top of the kitchen ‘steps’. They lurched and he grabbed at a shelf which mercifully held. What had that old girl at the club said a few days ago, commenting on someone’s bit of gossip? “A case of I coulda, woulda, shoulda?” Yes, that was it. At his time of life that wasn’t a bad piece of advice. Translated to the moment, he coulda made sure the steps were secure; he woulda if he’d not been impatient; and he shoulda with no one else in the house.

Erne laughed at himself. “You’re a pretty slow learner, old man. Remember last week that new shopping complex? You went for a good old tumble down the steps of the coffee- shop’s raised flooring!” That had been a major minor miracle. Arms and walking stick flailing the air, Erne somehow ended upright but on eye-level with an astonished young coffee guzzler. That coulda cost a popped hip-replacement and the re-opening of that nasty ulcer on the other shin.

“Have a good trip then, Pop?” the young bloke had cheekily grinned.

“Best thrill of the year!” he’d replied. The young bloke laughed, but Erne could not help noticing his relief at being spared picking up the various bits and pieces of ‘the old geezer’. Yeah, Erne ‘coulda’ watched where he was going; ‘woulda’, had he not been looking for the ‘up’ escalator that had gone off to hide behind the coffee shop; and ‘shoulda’? oh, definitely ‘shoulda’!

Erne got down gingerly and carefully reset the steps but those stupid words kept nibbling at him, like a brood (was it?) of hens pecking at him with their ‘coulda, woulda, shoulda; coulda, woulda, shoulda’. He smiled. Years ago a priest friend had confided to him: “Have to be off now for confessions at the Convent: my penance for the week; like being nibbled to death by a brood of hens.”

Erne had replied: “Nothing riveting there, I reckon: no gory plots against the Sister Superior, no steamy sex orgies, no embezzlement of Church properties: altogether a boring evening’s entertainment.”

“Not my most favourite chore. Making mole-hill trivialities into breast-beating guilt mountains must require real creative effort for the old dears. But Canon Law in its wisdom demands these weekly jousts with imperfection: sniffing round the wrong lamp-posts, if you ask me.”

Erne brought himself back to the present. Confounded memories! A bit like opening a dictionary to look for a word then getting interested in every other word but the one wanted.

Up till now he’d despised the ‘coulda, woulda, shoulda’ phrase, much like that other one people often indulged in: “If only I knew then, what I know now.” Pointless rumination, he thought: either we didn’t do or we didn’t know and that was that! A shrink friend had once laughed at him for expressing this view. “Ernest by name and earnest by nature,” he’d jibed.

There I go wandering back into the past again, he reprimanded himself. We all have regrets over situations in our life, but that is our being wise— or perhaps feeling foolish or stupid— after the event. And it probably means we learnt something: at best, more compassion or sympathy for other human beings.”

Perhaps, he concluded, I’m too shallow and self-centred to have lasting regrets for my actions; or perhaps it’s a self-preservation mechanism: deep lasting regrets could lead to despair and possibly self destruction. He was reminded of his shrink friend again and his quoting some old Greek: “The unexamined life is not worth living.”

“All very fine and dandy,” Erne had retorted, “if you’re not introspective by nature!”

“Dear old Over-Earnest,” Shrink had laughed.

Shrink had been dead many years now; Erne regretted that. But those kinds of regrets, he told himself, are rather different from the useless worrying over things we ‘shoulda, woulda, coulda.’

He grinned: he’d found the biscuits his wife had tried to hide “just so there’ll be something to give any visitor who calls.” He made a cuppa and took it to the veranda.

“If I have any regrets, it’s more probably over other people’s hardships and misfortunes,” he decided. He thought of the first class he’d taught, close to sixty year ago now, and of the deeply disturbed teenager sitting at the back who never spoke, never volunteered any response. The school had backed onto East Sydney’s fabled and, back then, still active crime areas – The Cross, Paddo, Darlo, The Jungo: slangy names reflecting the inhabitants’ over-easy attitudes. The lad had answered the door one night and been asked to bring his father. When he came, he was gunned down, right in front of the boy. So there the lad was— a lonely, brooding presence at the back of Erne’s Chemistry class, eaten by his own acidic guilt. The killer was never caught. Erne had heard a whisper or two that he’d mentioned to the Principal, but the police never came to ask questions, not that they’d take someone not twenty at the time seriously. He’d often wondered what had happened to young Leighton at the end of that year – his Intermediate Year. Seems he’d just left school and fallen off the radar.

In other places were kids who’d suicided; one, a talented pianist, had scaled a high tension cable tower and jumped into the rising sun; another, a bit of a computer whiz, simply wired himself to his love and zapped them both— a twisted Romeo and Juliet affair. And we teachers, Erne mused, never suspected a thing. And the myriad other golden lads and lasses come to dust, God love ‘em.

These, he consoled himself, were cases where he couldn’t even have got to the first ‘coulda’ base, let alone been capable of the ‘woulda’. Perhaps I’ve been right all along: there’s no point in the self-recriminating ‘shouldas’. Still, there would always be regret for those lost.

Erne pulled a wry face: the biscuits were fine; he’d forgotten to sugar the tea.