Practice Final

If existence is a buffet and my plate was my life, I’d say I may have tasted some things that were hard to swallow. Unfortunately life is not a buffet, you can’t ignore that not so tasty item that you selected, you just have to eat it. Somewhere between age eight and ten seems to be hot spot for accepting reality. It may be the realization that all those myths and fairy tales aren’t true or that death means there is no coming back. As we progress into the teen years small tastes of what is yet to come become clearer and clearer. It takes money to get most things accomplished and there is no way you can survive on birthday and Christmas card cash alone. As a teen most of that doesn’t matter anyway, after all you are invincible. When that gloomy day arrives and you figure out you’re an adult, some people say, “My God!, I’ve turned into my parents!” That can be a harsh wakeup call when you utter those words to yourself. Life’s hard truths can be a process to get through but unless the invisible blindfold is removed it cannot be accepted for what it is.

I found out that Santa was an imaginary being implanted into my mind by my parents at age eight. I had secretly set my alarm clock to go off at 4 A.M. Christmas morning and had hid it under my blanket next to me in bed. When it went off I shut it off quickly to prevent my parents from hearing it, I then put it back in its usual place and proceeded to creep down the hall to our living room. There under our tree were the same presents that had been there the night before, no new presents had been placed there by the jolly fat man. My mind raced with the thoughts of ‘the older kids at school were right. Maybe he isn’t real.’ Or was he real and I had been bad? I snuck away back to my room and sulked thinking of all those great presents I asked for and would not be getting. About a half an hour latter I heard a few thumps and bumps coming from down the hall. I got out of bed as I had earlier and proceeded down the hall in a covert manner. As I poked my head out into the living room I saw my mother back to wheeling a new bike into place beside the tree. Without thinking I announced myself with a loud, “What are you doing?” My mother jumped about three feet into the air and her face dropped to the floor. “Uh, Uh… What are you doing up?” she questioned. “I knew it was all a lie” I said. There was a long pause between us until she finally broke the silence “Well I guess I don’t have to get up early and do this anymore huh.” It wasn’t as crushing as I thought it would be after all, the whole thing didn’t seem possible anyway. “No mom, you don’t have to pretend anymore, I know all that stuff is make-believe”. Her abrupt response seemed a little harsh but we had been dealing with the death of her father just a few weeks before. Christmas without Gramp was something that none of us wanted to face, and it had been hard on both of us. Just like finding out Santa was a myth, his death stole the joy out of Christmas that year.

As I grew older I wanted things that came with a higher price tag and bumming money off my parents didn’t go very far. Cash from birthday cards and Christmas seemed to amount to less and less and the higher price tags made it disappear faster and faster. “No big deal”, I said to myself, “I’ll get a job”. Not such an easy task when you’re only fourteen with no transportation. Fortunately for me my dad had retired from work and was able to give me rides to a redemption center that my cousin owned. He offered me five bucks an hour to separate and count cans and he fed me lunch for free every day too. I saved as much of my earnings as I could and after two years I had finally put away enough to buy a car and get my driver’s licenses. It just so happened that one of dad’s older cousins was selling her 84’ Pontiac Parrisenne for $2500 bucks. It was in mint condition with only 41k miles on it, it still had the original tires on it complete with three inch white walls. As I soon found out the V8 engine had plenty of power, more than enough to get me in trouble. Within three months I had earned two speeding tickets and the fines that went with them. Apparently the state didn’t like my driving very much and they took my license away for demerit point accumulation. So now I had bills to pay and no way to get to work to earn the cash necessary to pay them. I worked out a deal with my dad and he paid the fines for me, then I worked my ass off for him doing any kind of physical labor he could come up with. He taught me a good lesson though; don’t be dumb if you can’t bail yourself out.

“Get your shoes off the couch!” “Quit running in the house” “Why did you poke holes in the ceiling?” “Why are you acting like this?” “Oh my god,… all I do is nag at you…its true… no, it can’t be…I have become… one of them”. This is just a small sequence of the things that made me realize it happened. I became my father and my mother all in one person. How could this be? I’m too young to act this old, wait a minute, no I’m not. I have to act this way or else this child will be more of a wild animal than he already is. Now the people who made me this way allow you to get away with murder at their house loading you full of sugar and then sending you back home to destroy my house. This is my mother’s way of getting sweet revenge. She always said she hoped my kids would be ten times worse than me and now she is adding fuel to the fire. I can’t complain too much though, both my kids are great compared to some of the other ones out there. My seven year old does great in school and when he gets out of control he is really just being himself, a seven year old boy. Now that I’m older turning into my parents is not such a bad thing, they are both great people and if it weren’t for them who knows what I would be like. Maybe I wouldn’t be a good parent and my kids might not be good kids. I thank my folks for raising me the way did with good values in mind.

So if life is a buffet, don’t be afraid to do some taste testing. No one wants the same bland thing all the time. Life needs to be experimented with and adjusted to compensate for the hard truths we face and the lessons we learn from them. Make the most of life in the short time you’re here on this place we call earth. In the end there is only one guarantee, you’ll never get out alive.