Life is much like a college experience in that it is in many cases flexible but predicated on the decisions we make. When I was a child, futures were more easily predictable. Boys would be doctors and girls would be nurses. The likes of Gloria Steinem came along and balled everything up. Our vision of the future is no longer fixed. A fireman it is. A doctor, yeah that’s the ticket, with no consideration of gender. .
College, albeit a subsection of life, offers its own twisted path to stardom. Let’s take my friend ‘Joe’, Joe has been a math whiz since before learning the significance of no.1 and no.2 as they pertain to bathroom visits. ‘Young Einstein’ as they called him during his regular taunting, pummeling and bullying sessions in grade school, switched majors over a beer with an Archaeology co-ed he had met in the university bookstore. Had the aspiring archaeologist not been wearing tight jeans that day, he very well may have been a famous mathematician today. Instead, he and his wife, who has since increased the size of her jeans only one size, own Joe and Louise’s Archaeology. They have two girls who’s only correlation with rocks is windows.
As we reach the home stretch of being, we are bound to have, if not regrets at least second thoughts of how life went or has gone so far. I find my career choice was a good and satisfying one. Personal choices may have perhaps been tweaked, and I could still kick myself in the ass for not...well that’s for another time. But in a nutshell, I harbor only one significant regret in all the years I have been blessed with.. I would have rather been a duck.
When the day’s strife weighs too heavily and there doesn’t seem to be way out, what does a duck do? S/he goes for a swim. When you come home and find your insurance agent in bed with your spouse and you know in your heart of hearts that their story of a necessary physical for life insurance, may not be revealing the whole situation. A hundred things run through your mind. A duck? A duck goes for a swim. No messy crime scene, no antiseptic smelling body bags being dragged across the carpet, the little woman had cleaned just a week ago. Much like a human father evicts his worthless non-working offspring from the basement, a drake intercedes and sends the smaller duck to find their own path. The human wife will just never let him forget it and she goes on and on and on...Mr. King, I’m afraid our forty five minutes are up but I think we made some progress today…
wjk/4/26/20/471