If I could only go back

As you grow older you look back on your life, and you think about memories that stick in your head. You know the memories that pop up at the most random times, make your heart sink and make you regret what that memory is all about. You think to yourself, "If I could only go back" I could change this or I could do that. Unfortunately, I have way too, many of those such memories. 

There is one of those that I have played in my head for many many years. When I was in junior high or maybe early in high school our family was not doing great financially. As a kid who was pretty active in the church, skiing, going out with friends, and not having a real job that made me pretty dependent on my parents for money. I will say that I was kind of resentful of my parents when they frequently told me no when I asked for money or something else that I wanted.

 One time I was asking for money and again I was told no. I knew that my mom had just got a string of pearls and during a heated discussion with her I brought that up. She was very upset over it, so she went and got them and was, going to return them. There were a lot of things said at that time, I am not sure why but she got out of the car and headed back into the house. She dropped the box with the pearls in it and then accidentally stepped on it. When that happened she broke the string of pearls and they rolled all over the garage floor. We got as many of them as we could but we both knew that was the end of the returning thoughts. I felt absolutely horrible then and I have replayed that scene in my head thousands of times. I think "If I could only go back"

When I was around 9 or 10 I was in my dad's closet and I found his guns. My dad had several guns and I had been out with him and he had let me shoot a couple of them. The one that really caught my eye was a single shot rifle, it is a J. Stevens Crackshot 26. I thought that it was a .22 and those were the rounds that I grabbed and I took the gun to my friend's house that lived across the street. I can remember that it was raining out but I didn't pay any attention to that. I put a shell in the gun and when I tried to fire it the gun didn't go off. I tried a few more shells and they didn't work either. So I left the gun behind the neighbor's house and I brought the shells back. Next thing you know the neighbor called the house and told them about the gun behind their house. I remember my dad fussing and fuming about it when he came into the house with it. His major complaint was that there was a 22 shell in it and it was a .32 caliber, not a .22 and that could have been very dangerous to the shooter. He never confronted me, he just let my guilty conscience be my punishment. "If I could only go back"  

When we moved to Colorado we learned that one of the favorite winter hobbies there was skiing. Coming from Virginia we naturally didn't have ski gear. I am not sure how we found out about it but we heard that Sears rented ski equipment and they sold off their old equipment for cheap. So my parents took us all down to Sears in Denver and we got ski equipment. Now you can only imagine how they looked and I was really unhappy about that fact. I complained every time I used my stuff, I complained about how it looked, how it worked, and how old it was. I was not a bit grateful for the fact that I had my own stuff. We found that at Mary Jane@ Winter Park, they had a free lift and that was where we would go skiing. This was another thing that I complained about, I wanted a lift ticket so that I could ski on the real runs. I even went as far as to walk up the big slopes just so I could ski back down them. Instead of being thankful that I was even at a ski area I was just complaining. "If I could only go back"