I’ve already had a chance at that bottle and turned it down.

“Houston woman convicted of killing her husband by running over him with her Mercedes in a hotel parking lot after finding him with his mistress.”

The Clara Harris case was a tell for our whole society. Our perverse fascination for murderous revenge was exposed in the detailed nation-wide coverage of the story that stretched from the day she ran over her husband, through the murder trial, to the wrongful death suit months later.

Clara, the now-infamous Dentist’s wife, tracked down her cheating husband with his mistress at a Houston motel and ran over him in the parking lot multiple times with the family Mercedes. Her stepdaughter was sitting in the front seat at her side, begging Clara not to kill daddy. The daughter, 16 at the time of the murder, is quoted years later as saying: “Anyone who shared my ride in the car that evening, seeing my dad’s face as he was about to be hit, and experiencing the horrible feel of the car bumping over his body would understand that this murderess deserves no sympathy.” The police and witnesses confirmed Clara did not stop after running over him once, but ran over him repeatedly, some witness accounts claim as many as five times. Surprisingly, a significant percentage of the subsequent public response claimed she should not have been convicted, that the cheating husband got what he deserved.

One miserable day—in the nightmare two years between Connie’s “I love Bruce,” and “I’m leaving”—our family was touring Greenwich, England. At her insistence, I was trying to put on a good face. The raw bleeding agony of her betrayal kept pushing into my thoughts, leaving me blindly stumbling through the day, totally overwhelmed by the cold aching reality beneath what I saw as her fake smiles, fake laughter, and fake ministrations to our children. Every pose she struck seemed a mockery of motherhood. She looked into the eyes of our children and pretended we were the same happy family I always thought us to be even though I knew she held the absolute conviction I was such a bad husband, such a bad father that her relationship with Bruce was justified.

It should have been a delightful family day, but violence kept forcing its way into my thoughts. I alternately wished to kill myself, then Connie, then Bruce. I would mentally hurl the thoughts from my head, trying to enjoy some moment of the day, but the bloody wishes would push back in and cycle through my mind repeatedly. Reoccurring throughout that day of disorienting madness were a few clear thoughts: “I won’t be that kind of father.” I held and still hold the conviction that every bad choice parents make can multiply the bad choices their children will ultimately make.

That’s why it’s so hard for me to imagine why Clara took her stepdaughter along on the vehicular homicide that killed the girl’s own father. I thought, "Who would do that to a kid?"

That day I pushed my thoughts away from violence by thinking, “What kind of father would do that to his children?” Not the kind I wanted to be. By the end of the day, clinging to the desire not to hurt my children, I careened away from those obsessive, murderous thoughts, and, for the most part, never went back to them.

Sometimes I think Connie and Bruce owe me a trip to England with the kids, at the very least a pleasant day in Greenwich to replace the one their choices robbed of me, but most of the time I think I owe myself that day because allowing those thoughts to steal it from me was my choice, my weakness.

By the time we went to England, Connie had agreed for me to go see a marriage counselor but had refused to go herself. Later she agreed to go to the counselor herself, alone. Much later, she agreed to go with me to a few joint sessions. Her mantra on the drive up each time was, “It won’t make any difference.” Prescient that. During the sessions, she would most often decline to speak. Lots of silence there. On the drive back from a session, she would explode, angry outbursts that seemed to come from deep within, but were disconnected from anything in the session.

Occasionally she would curse at me. She cursed like a pre-teen trying to learn the low art. Words dropping out of her mouth, stumbling into the air poorly timed with awkward inflections. Cursing was so atypical of her it silenced me. I had no response to her cursing, didn't know what to say and didn’t dare laugh at its awkwardness.

Prior to the England trip, the counselor I was seeing pulled out of me the fact I was not sleeping at all. Earnestly telling me sleep deprivation could cause psychosis and that I should avoid psychosis if possible, this counselor, who was so proud of his homeopathic methods, immediately whipped me over to a psychiatrist for sleeping pills and anti-depressants. To get these pills, I had to have a thirty minute face-to-face session with the shrink at least once a month. The next time I went to see him after the England trip with its’ miserable day of murderous thoughts I mentioned it to him. I had never had thoughts like that before and I worried they were a precursor to something horrible. I told him I had a day where I was obsessed “with thoughts of suicide/murder.” After a brief pause, a direct, wide-eyed look, and a blink, the shrink said, “You mean murder/suicide, don’t you.” I laughed and said, “Yeah, I guess that would be the correct order wouldn’t it.” I think my laughter was a good sign. The shrink seemed to think so. I hope it was a good sign. Everyone survived the day alive, anyway.

A Mark Twain short story, “The Man Who Corrupted Hadlyburg,” thematically asserts man can’t claim to be good until he has the choice to be evil. In the little pitcher* days my cousins and I shared, surreptitiously absorbing our father’s words from outside their conversation circle, I heard one of my seven uncles joke about being “a better Christian” than his brothers because he had remained abstinent his whole life though he “knew [he] had more chances at a bottle” than they. The assumption beneath his joke was virtue not subjected to temptation was not authentic. It was my first intimation of the labyrinthine complexities of good and evil.

An anonymous comment on “e-verities” asked me if I “believe in revenge? Do [I] believe it is ever justified?” I though about that question for a while, reading back through what I had written about forgetting wrongs verses revenging them, trying to determine if there was a subconscious warm-up to, or a lengthy justification being built for some act of revenge I had yet to take.

I concluded I haven’t been planning revenge, even subconsciously, but decrying it. It's true many victims seem to have a gnawing need for revenge, but I really believe the only true victim of our bad choices is ourselves—left helpless in the face of ultimate, inevitable, consequences.

Others, hurt by our choices, are only victims if they choose to be. They desire revenge the same way a drunk desires a bottle, but they need something else, something healing, something that will take them out of the downward spiral of revenge for wrong, revenge for revenge for wrong, revenge for revenge for revenge . . . Well I guess this pattern is also eternal, but I wouldn’t call it a verity

My reply to “anonymous” was: To take revenge is to take spiritual poison. I’ve already had a chance at that bottle and turned it down. The dark eternal consequences of choosing revenge are more abhorrent to me than the ephemeral rush available to me in taking revenge. The real eternal verity here is not revenge or forgetting, but forgiveness.



*little pitchers , first the surreptitious attentiveness of my cousins and myself was noticed, then silent arch looks passed from uncle to uncle, and one would say, “little pitchers have big ears.” This was followed by winks and knowing looks all around, a heads together volume reduction, and a change in subject. Still, we heard quite a bit.