Wake up and smell the coffee! Better yet, wake up and smell that five dollar a cardboard cup coffee you can buy with whipped cream and caramel! You, the perfect American couple! One perfect man and one perfect woman with two perfect children, the all star football quarterback and the Homecoming, Prom Queen, cheerleader. Both high school valedictorians who go off to good colleges and graduate cum laude to move onto top level jobs. Five years later, while Mom and Dad retire to the well earned glory of southern golf courses, these children will marry other perfect children and continue on with the American legacy, upping the ante just one notch for the gipper in each generation of course.
It is the American nightmare, brought to you by those lovely people who gave us Humvees and psychoanalysis, and dedicated to the proposition that no problem is ever insurmountable given enough money and backed by a brash and aggressive American.
The reality of course, is that most of this is a bunch of hooey, so we spend our lives beating our heads against the window trying to get into a house that doesn’t exist.
Life is not about perfection. Life is about imperfection and the wonderful ways that human beings deal with it. Perfection is a concept right up there with Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy, an idea that makes no sense at all if you think about it. Nobody except maybe your mother ever wants your old teeth and anyone who dared to slide down a chimney in the middle of the night anymore, would immediately end up in jail. And while these guys make for a good story, they also make many people feel inferior and left out when the reality falls through.
Life is about secretly shoveling the snow for the widow down the street and taking a box of “extra” groceries to the family across the street and helping Uncle Harry get up the street to buy those cigars we all hate to smell, because he loves them and we love him. It is about bailing cousin Chris out of jail for the umpteenth time knowing he’ll be back in there next week. Then having to deal with those who rightfully say we are enablers, because we did it and we are.
Life is about compassion and love and all the imperfections that accompany them. It is about learning and growing and all those by-passes we take along the way. Life is real.
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