There’s a lesson in everything, even the most painful things — maybe especially the painful things because they stick with you like the scars.
When I was a kid, I took a header off the front porch — still got the scar to prove it. I learned to stay away from the edge of my grandparents’ porch.
But not all the lessons are as painful as the things that brought them to our doorstep.
Modified driver Steve Arpin was burned by 300-degree fluid when a radiator hose came loose. It was one of those freak accidents.

Both Arpin and I would begin to see things that have been said proven to us.
Things like people being at their best during the bad times. Things like the racing community coming together as a family when one of their own is in trouble.

I’d met Arpin a few days before and had planned a feature story on him, about how much he had won over the past year or so, and how he came out of snowmobile racing as a kid and evolved quickly into a dirt-track driver.
Then, Arpin was in the hospital and the story was on hold until I caught up with him again at his home in Minnesota.
Arpin is a good guy — the type of guy you’d want to be your buddy because he’s quick with a joke and a laugh at yours. He loves kids and will spend as long as it takes signing autographs for them.
But when he was injured, the feature story, which I thought would be about his climb from snowmobile racing to one of the top modified drives in the country, changed significantly.
Both Arpin and I would begin to see things that have been said proven to us.
Things like people being at their best during the bad times. Things like the racing community coming together as a family when one of their own is in trouble.
I called Julie Reich, who along with her husband, Brian, used to be Arpin’s landlord. She went on and on about how much she loved Steve — how much everybody does.
Before he was injured, the pipes froze and burst in his home in Minnesota. Some friends had managed to get the carpet out, but there was a load of work to be done and the risk of infection for a victim of second-degree burns might be high unless something was done.
So while the Reich’s were helping to organize a benefit spaghetti dinner and auction to help cover Arpin’s medical bills, the couple went to Arpin’s house and cleaned and repaired everything before Steve and his wife, Trina, arrived home.
“It was amazing,” Arpin said. “The place was absolutely spotless. It was like a hospital.”
The spaghetti dinner at Grumpy’s Restaurant in Grand Meadow, Minn., sold out quickly, and donated items for the auction rolled in. A benefit fund was set up at the Farmer’s & Merchants State Bank to help Arpin, a Canadian national who was in the process of getting health insurance for himself before starting the race season at Golden Isles Speedway in Brunswick, Ga.
Those medical bills would be even higher had a group of NASCAR Sprint Cup drivers — Carl Edwards, Kenny Wallace, Ken Schrader, Bobby Labonte along with Don Schoenfeld — not conspired to fly the Arpins home on Labonte’s jet. That act alone saved the Arpins thousands in hospital bills because there was no way he could make the drive or fly on a commercial airliner due to the risk of infection.
Thankfully, Arpin has healed quickly and was to be back racing this past weekend at Enid (Okla.) Speedway Park before a “home opener” of sorts at Deer Creek Speedway in Spring Valley, Minn., the next week.
And thankfully there are people in the racing industry who are willing to do anything they can to help another “member of the family.”
It makes me proud to be a part of it.