And.... Scene

It is a story I've told time and time again.  For years, I was unable to get through it without completely falling apart; at some point, I could feign enough distance to spin the tale without spinning out of control.  In dreams and quiet moments during the day, it is the Lifetime Channel psycho-drama-tear-jerker that always seems to be on.  I don't need to watch the whole thing.  I already know the ending.  Or do I?

Open on a girl, distant and distracted in the back seat of a car.  The chatter from the front seat is miles removed from what she sees and hears; she is far away, wondering why she is there, wondering where exactly "there" is, wishing she had stayed home but feeling dimly privileged to have been invited out on this last Saturday of spring break.  She peers ahead and to her left; suddenly, her face flashes alarm.  Something is off.  She yells to the driver to stop but the car accelerates.  Her arms fly up to shield her face.

Impact.

Cut to black.

Nietzche wrote "what does not kill me, makes me stronger."  It's a wonderful ending to the movie, if you can write it that way.  But the loose ends don't always wrap up neatly in a bow at the end of an hour and a half, or even a day, a year, a decade or two decades.  What does not kill me, makes me stronger.  But "stronger" is a relative term.  And what about what does kill... even if only for a few seconds, or a few minutes?  What say you, Nietzche?

Voices above her are frantic, disorganized, panicked.  She opens her eyes, the ground coming into slow focus.  Why is she here?  What happened at that party?  Who are all of these people and why are they staring at her?  She lifts her head and finds a familiar face.  Relief.  She shifts her foot and realizes she is partially on grass, partially on concrete.  She has to get up.  She's embarrassing herself...

For years following the accident, I lived by the rule of carpe diem.  Sieze the day, for I never knew whether another would come.  I would appreciate each moment, savour every experience.  If the moment seemed dull, I would spice it up.  If I am to carpe the diem, it should be a diem worth carpe-ing.  If I am going to wake up on the concrete again, it will be for a reason far more interesting and entertaining than some silly car accident.  If I was going to face down the Reaper again, it was going to be with a smile on my face, and come hell or high water, it was going to be on my terms.

Pushing her hands to the ground, the girl tries to push herself up but crumbles  back to the ground as the strangers standing over her murmur.  Her chest feels like it's on fire.  Confusion and embarrassment give way to terror; she cannot get up.  She touches her face.  Blood.  She tries to straighten her leg, but when the top of her leg moves, her knee and foot remain planted like so much dead weight on the ground.  "Am I going to live?" she asks her friend.  The friend, who is shaken and injured herself, nods yes.  "Will I ever walk again?" 

Silence.

I promised myself that I would never forget the second chance I'd been given by the many doctors, friends and family who helped me.  When did I forget that promise?  When did the gift of survival become just another life lesson that had been learned, tested, then packed away like an old holiday decoration?  

The paramedics arrive and scurry to her side, carring a wooden stabilitizing board.  She begins to cry, because she believes the board means death.  She is shivering; shock has set in.  

Years later, Byron and I turned down a job on a sailing vessel called the Fantome.  With Hurricane Mitch bearing down on our island home of Grand Cayman a few months later, we shuttered the shop, consoled the guests, and bunkered down for what would turn out to be the second most powerful Caribbean hurricane since the 1800s.  Returning to work a few days later, we learned that the Fantome, after trying to outrun the storm, had been lost at sea along with her crew.  All that was ever found was a few life jackets and a portion of a staircase.  How many more reminders did I need that I was lucky to have survived?

"Don't cut my socks off.  They're my father's."

The movie replays itself every day.  (BTW:  World's Worst Netflix Queue EVER.)  Each time, I am torn apart and rebuilt. 

"I'm sorry.  I'm so sorry."

My chest tightens.  My breath quickens.  My throat closes.

"We were finally able to reach your brother."

Over and over again, every single time, a small part of me dies. 

Prom.  Graduation.  Learning to walk again.  Riding a bike.  The first time back on the volleyball court. 

Inhale.

"You've healed remarkably well."

The chasm begins to close. 

She steps out into the sunlight, warmth radiating onto her face.  She closes her eyes and steels herself to move forward, one step at a time. 

Roll credits.

What does not kill me, makes me stronger... eventually.  What does not kill me, makes me me. 

Even twenty years later.

Carpe diem.

Wasted Youth

As I was walking to the car yesterday, I caught my reflection in a window.  I had one of those moments when you catch a glimpse of your reflection by surprise, sigh and think "wow, I had hoped it wasn't THAT bad..."  And then I thought "yup, youth really IS wasted on the young."

I continued to mull this phrase over as I trudged up the steps in the parking garage.  "Stupid young people, having all of that youth and wasting it," I thought.  "I wish I had appreciated MY youth before it was gone.  Young people suck.  Young ME sucked!"

Then I started thinking about all of the other things that are wasted on those stupid, sucky young people, and I became annoyed.  I realized that young people get LOTS of great stuff that they just don't appreciate, like:

1. Good hair.  My hair was never particularly cooperative, but boy has it gone downhill as I've gotten older, and looking back, it really was nicer (though not necessarily easily managed) than I gave it credit for.  Plus, for the last couple of months, I've been shedding like a frightened cat in a windstorm, so it's even more disastrous that I have less of my uncooperative hair than ever before.  Darn you,  young people, and your glorious manes! [Shakes fist]
2. Alcohol.  Many young people use alcohol simply as a way to get drunk and kiss strangers in a bar (or was that just me?).  As it turns out, there are a lot of really fine liquors, wines and beers out there that are meant to be sipped and appreciated, not chugged and barfed up.  Unfortunately, having spent so much time chugging and passing out on pool tables in my own reckless youth, I never really learned how to drink "correctly", so I tend to avoid drinking much at all unless I'm properly supervised.
3. Confidence.  Young people are full of ego, bravado, and I-rule-you-drool-ish swagger, and yet most of them have nothing but their youthful good looks to back it up.  Yet, because they are young, it's somehow okay!  I am 37 years old now, have an awesome job, look pretty good (if I do say so myself), and a great family but I also have enough sense to know that brazen over-confidence is obnoxious and off-putting.  I missed my chance to tell the world to go fuck itself and shout my own praises from the mountain-top, and this makes me sad.
4. Preschool.  Let's face it.  Preschool - long days filled with Play Doh, finger paints, recess, running through the sprinklers and generally making mayhem - was awesome.  Did you appreciate it?  Did you realize just how fleeting those brilliant moments of joy would be?  Did it ever occur to you that when you grew up, you would NOT be able to dress up like a kitty cat pirate robot and parade down the street singing the "SpongeBob SquarePants" theme song at the top of your lungs?  No?  Case closed.
5. Dance clubs.  Dancing is one of the best ways you can relieve stress, especially if you're tipsy enough not to care whether you dance well (see #2 above).  Can someone please explain to me what "stress" 20 year olds have?  Please?  Anyone?
6. Dexterity.  Every young person I know can type an email or text message using only their thumbs in a matter of nanoseconds.  Very few of those emails or texts need to be sent with such urgency.  By contrast, I occasionally need to type an email response from my iPhone in the two minutes it takes to walk from my office to the cafeteria, yet I lack the dexterity to do it without significant typos, and apparently, using texting shorthand is "unprofessional".  NTTAWWT, but AFAICT, their texts are NWR so this really kind of has me ROTFLMFAO while simultaneously feeling FINE.  I mean, WTF?
7. Summer.  Young people get their summers free to frolic in the sunshine, run in slow motion on beaches, hang out at cafes and travel.  They don't spend the whole day staring at a computer, answering the same question for the twenty-seventh time, and waiting for the world's most interminable conference call to end.   They don't spend their days pining to go outside... they just go outside!  They don't wonder if they can make it to Starbucks and back in the eight minutes they have before their next meeting (AND have time to go to the bathroom?)... they just go to Starbucks!  They don't wonder if there will be time on the weekend - in between the laundry and the dusting and the dishes and answering emails and getting the child where he needs to be and trying to cook dinner - to go to the pool and relax.  They just go to the pool!  And worse yet, they look good in their swimsuits!  Gaaaah!

I'm sure there are many other pleasures and privileges in life that are wasted on the young, but since I am a grown-up and have this pesky job, I don't have much more time to think of them.  But thanks to the googles, I discovered that George Bernard Shaw actually expanded this famous quote about the foolishness of young people, saying "[t]hey're brainless, and don't know what they have; they squander every opportunity of being young on being young."

That they do, George.  That they do.  If only we could all be so lucky.

That's just biology

Dropping my son off for school this morning, I got myself into an interesting exchange with some of the boys in his class over whether one of them would ever get married.  It roughly went as follows:

Child #1 (largely apropos of nothing):  I'm never getting married!

Me:  Okay.

Child #1:  No, really!  I'm NOT getting married!

Me:  Okay - you don't have to.  But you might change your mind someday.  Or you might not.  Maybe it's best not to decide when you're six.

Child #1:  No.  I've already decided.  I'm NEVER getting married!

Child #2:  But you have to get married SOMEDAY, Child #1!

Child #1:  No.  No, I don't.  I'm NOT getting married!

Child #3:  But if you don't get married, you can never have a baby.

Me:  No, that's not true.  You don't have to be married to have a baby.  That's just biology.

As the debate continued behind me, I looked down at my son, who was crunching Ritz crackers and watching keenly, then over to my son's teacher, who was snickering.  Then it hit me: it is entirely possible that Child #3's parents had told him that you have to be married to have a baby - and it was even more than just "possible" that if they did tell him that, it was because it is a core value or ideal to them that you should be married before you have children.

Yikes.  I am SO going to get a phone call.

Now, in my own defense (because this is MY blog and I can do what I want here), what I said was technically accurate.  It is not a biological requirement to be married before a child can be produced.  My guess is that if it WAS a biological requirement, we would not be having so many other debates in this country about the availability of contraception, access to abortion, gay rights, etc. etc. etc., and there would not be nearly as many single mothers (and fathers, natch) out there. So, at least as far as the "structural integrity" of my statement goes, I feel pretty good.

Plus, it was, is and will always be important for me to ensure that my adopted son understands that there was nothing that his birth mother (who was not married when she had him) did that was wrong.  I also do not want him thinking that he has to get married when he is older; if he meets someone and falls in love and they want to get married... great!  More power to him.  If not, I am perfectly fine with that as well.  If he wants to have a baby but he isn't married (for whatever reason!), I want him to know - intellectually as well as deep down inside - that this is OKAY.  I won't judge him, and I will defend his choice to my dying day as vigorously as he will allow me.

And, well, let's face it... the reality is that I sometimes speak before I think things through.  There were probably other more subtle ways of accomplishing my goals, and perhaps I should have availed myself of those methods.  Alas, I am human, therefore I occasionally (RARELY) err.  Get used to it.  Or, you know... forgive.  Isn't that the divine thing to do?

But...

Thanks to the benefit of hindsight https://litigation-essentials.lexisnexis.com/webcd/app?action=DocumentDisplay&crawlid=1&doctype=cite&docid=55+Case+W.+Res.+633&srctype=smi&srcid=3B15&key=51bb52d52fa56821384344a7c7b23a44 (darn you, hindsight and your associated bias!), I also understand that my response MAY have UNINTENTIONALLY flown directly in the face of the values of others, and I probably shouldn't have responded so flippantly without knowing whether my statement would have the relative weight of "Santa Claus doesn't exist" or "The sun is hot and really far away".  And it wouldn't be COMPLETELY ridiculous for those other people to pick up the phone and ask me to be a bit more careful in the future.

I mean, after all, that's just biology.