A few years ago I was driving by a suburban children’s park at night. It was early spring, still cold out, no leaves on the trees yet. This made it easy for me to spot a flaming garbage can in the middle of the park. Uncharacteristic of the placid neighbourhood to say the least.<\/p>\n
I pulled over and headed into the park. There was no one around, no indication of who had started the fire. What to do? I had no phone, couldn’t call the fire department, didn’t even know if a (so far) contained fire in a garbage can warranted disturbing emergency services much less the sleeping houses around me…<\/p>\n
I can handle this, I thought.<\/p>\n
In the absence of any water, I thought I could snuff the flames with some sand from one of the nearby sandboxes. But lo and behold, I got out there to find all the sand was frozen together with the remnants of the winter’s ice. I used a stick to chip away at it, applying all my focus to the task. Finally I gathered what I thought might help douse the flames and scooted over to dump the sand into the bin.<\/p>\n
It didn’t put out the fire. Worse, I looked up to see another car had pulled up outside the park. The mortified face of the suburbanite woman in the passenger seat, staring at me. Her husband, beyond, on his cell phone, urgently calling for help.<\/p>\n
I made my way over, smiling pleasantly, waving a hand disarmingly. I said, “Are you calling the fire department? Good, because I don’t have a phone and I don’t think I can put it out myse–”<\/p>\n
It was too late. The passenger side window was rolled up protectively. The woman was in a panic, ordering her husband to quickly get a move on; the crazy man burning things in the park was heading straight toward them. The car blasted off. “No!” I was left shouting in the street. “No… No… It’s not what you think… No…”<\/p>\n
A few minutes later the fire trucks careened around the corner – seemed a little dramatic but granted, the frozen sand wasn’t exactly doing the trick. I left fearing further accusation.<\/p>\n
When I hear bad things about someone I like to remember this experience. It reminds me that things aren’t always how they appear and that there are at least two sides to every story. Reputation can be a dangerous thing. But at the end of the day, you either get a chance to tell your side or you just have to buck up and accept what you can’t change. After all, it’s up to the person driving away to believe what they want about a pile of garbage that’s gone down in flames.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
There are at least two sides to every story.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-156","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news-from-the-studio"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tylergibb.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/156","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tylergibb.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tylergibb.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tylergibb.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tylergibb.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=156"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/tylergibb.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/156\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tylergibb.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=156"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tylergibb.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=156"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tylergibb.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=156"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}