Dont Judge a Book by Its Cover

There comes a time in everyone’s life when they must admit that their parents were right. We do not like to admit it, but the old adages they told us as children are normally correct, and we teach them to our children. My mother was adamant about teaching me that you should “never judge a book by its cover”. Some examples of what she meant are: the color of someone’s skin, the way they dress, the type of car they drive, anything that might give false impressions, either both good or bad. For the majority of my life, I had lived by that rule; kept it engrained in my mind, but when it came to the men in my life, well the cover was everything. When it came to men I was a student of Oscar Wilde who coined the phrase “It is only the shallow who do not judge by appearances.” I was under the impression that aesthetics were everything. It took me until one day before my twenty-fifth birthday to determine that maybe I should apply the saying that Mom taught me, rather than the philosophy of Wilde, to every aspect of my life. I now know that it is truer than anything else that Mother ever taught me; “never judge a book by its cover”, or you just might miss a great story. The day before my twenty-fifth birthday three of my girlfriends and I decided to go out for a pre-birthday celebration. There was a big party planned the following night, and we knew that we would not have a lot of time to hang out together. We got all dressed up and went to our favorite sports bar, George’s. I guess we could be considered regulars, and because of that, we knew a lot of the people there that night. As we sat around our table, listening to music and talking, several people came over to the table to give me birthday wishes since they would not be attending the party the next night. About halfway through the evening, a friend of mine named Chuck came over to say hello because we had not seen each other in quite some time. He had been out of town visiting family in Huntsville, Texas. He told