I Tried Everything I Could Think Of.
Shane is pretty close to perfect. I mean, for a teenager, he does everything pretty much right. He keeps himself clean, tries not to overdo the video games, does his homework on time, turns in his classwork, gets good grades, and isn’t addicted to drugs.
But Shane has a hard time doing a few simple things. For example, he auditioned for the school play and got in. Hooray! But…
Shane couldn’t find the cast list. To be fair, the drama team is new this year – but I would think that would just make him want to ask around, figure out where the cast list was posted.
But no. He didn’t know where it was hanging, He never knew it was posted, even though other people were finding out about their parts. In fact, Dylan texted us a copy of the cast list from his college 10 hours away.
“Congratulations!’ Dylan texted.
“Huh?” Shane responded.
“You’re in the fall play!” Dylan said, 500 miles away. Shane had no idea.
The next day, Shane was required to initial the cast list to let the team know that he accepted his part. First thing in the morning, he went to the room where it was supposed to be, but he didn’t see the list hanging there. It turned out that it was on the other side of the door – the inside – and he just didn’t see it.
Meanwhile, we were going on with our lives. I made an appointment for Shane to see his therapist, which meant he could miss rehearsal, and we had a plan to go out of town after school the following day.
But I couldn’t make a follow-up appointment for therapy because I had no idea when Shane had play practice. Even after initialing the list, he hadn’t been able to secure a copy of the rehearsal schedule.
“Did you at least talk to your teacher, and tell her what was going on?” Shane had already missed the first two rehearsals.
“I couldn’t find her,” he said. I’d have figured out a way to find her – or someone – but Shane? It never occurred to him to do any more than to wander the halls and look around.
Our plans included a trip out of town – and we had the car packed. But Shane still didn’t have a copy of the rehearsal schedule, so we didn’t know if he would be attending rehearsal, or not.
“You’re not going to rehearsal – if there is a rehearsal,” I told him, wanting to get on the road as soon as possible. “You are going to miss the entire first week of rehearsal and probably at least one day next week because you couldn’t figure out how to get a copy of the schedule!”
“I tried everything I could think of,” Shane said.
“Don’t you know a whole bunch of people in the play? Couldn’t you have asked one of those people to see their schedules? You could have taken a picture of the schedule sometime in the past seven hours?”
I was flabbergasted. He really couldn’t come up with an alternative solution when the teacher wasn’t standing in her doorway waiting?
Shane – with a sudden recognition of the obvious – started texting people he knew.
I just sat back, shaking my head, having no clue how something so small could become something so huge.