There was an old TV commercial in the mid 90s about the Dodge Caravan minivan. It showed a Mom busily zipping around town picking up the kids from school, dropping them off at different sports events, her going to the market after, then back for the kids and her finally crashing into bed later that night saying to the effect, “My Caravan enables me to have the "good life.”
I sat there and thought, “Are you fucking kidding me?” Being perpetually harried and occupied for every minute of every day is not the good life. I don’t care how time efficient you are, chasing minutia against the clock and then telling yourself this is a “life well lived” is to me, a real exertion of mental gymnastics. People are guilty of this and I too at times. However though, if you get a hint, a small thought in the back of your head that you really may not like the situation you’re in, but to avoid that truth you then portray it in loftier, more positive BS? It can make your life, situation, seem tolerable and perhaps...noble.
I once overheard a 4 year J&W chef/manager at Seekonk’s Andrea restaurant say to himself, after the problem of two wedding receptions occurring in the same room, at the same time (a booking fuck up) that “This is not a problem, but an opportunity.”
No dude, this is a problem...and someone dumped the fuck up on you. You get to eat it and then get reamed out of you don’t fix this successfully in 8 hours. If you manage to pull it off, you will get verbal praise, which costs Andrea’s bottom line nothing. Now problem solve for them for several years and you may, may get a promotion. “Opportunity?” Well, if you use that to carry and motivate yourself through a difficult time, perhaps it’s OK, but if you totally believe it, turn it into a religion, a CAUSE, I begin to wonder about your grasp of reality. I guess little lies to yourself, forced perspectives you may take in order to get through a problem may work, if it’s the only answer and action that you have at the moment, but for how long and how many times do you use this and then it becomes a way of life?
**
For all the faults my Dad had, and he had many, he also had some great advice. You learn, in time, that your parents were human too and they couldn’t get everything right. You learn this, you can call yourself an adult finally.
In the summer of ‘75, Dad was told that he had been elected CEO of First Federal Savings & Trust, a small chain of banks headquartered in Providence. He’d take the position January 1st 1976. Was he happy? Not in the way you would think, he was more relieved when he heard the news.
On a car ride in his 14 foot Impala one Saturday, we were talking about the new change and he says to me, “There’s nothing wrong with hard work, devotion and stick to it-iv-ness. But don’t become a “company man’ where you live exclusively for them and not your own life. Yeah, you have to find a balance in all that.” Hindsight, 20/20 vision comes too late huh?
When I asked him was it worth it, those past decades of knocking himself out for the bank, he said, “Well, now I no longer have too...I will direct policy instead which oddly enough, is far easier than what I used to do.”
Some seconds go by...
“Was it worth it…” he finally says and trails off. He wasn’t so sure himself as he was still working that question in his own head still.
A few minutes go by and he then says to me, “Remember all the way financial products work? How I taught you? USE them! Make your money work for you! Work smarter, not harder!”
I read between the lines in that last statement, he wasn’t all together happy of the effort he put in that finally brought him to the pinnacle of success. It was hard won and I suspected he was battle weary from it all at 45. He had “made it,” succeeded, but that lasted just one year and none of us knew at the time that it would be so short.
How did he enjoy his new success? He ate it. His favorite thing to do was to eat out and boy, did we ever for a year. On Friday’s we’d try different restaurants and he’d stuff himself and down two Manhattan cocktails along with it, or six. At Archie’s in Pawtucket once, he and I sat in the same boothside with my Mom on the other. I had a plate of scallops and he a delmonico steak. Out of nowhere, he turns and stabs his fork into my plate and spears up three to four scallops and eats them, without asking. “Richard!” my Mom protests, “You raised in a barn? You NEVER do that at a table!”
“I paid for it” he retorts.
“I
don’t care! Where are your manners!” Mom bitched.
He then slices ¼ of his steak off and plops that in my plate as restitution. That didn’t assuage me at all as that piggish behavior left a bad taste in my mouth. His new money and position enabled him to be a glutton and he ballooned in that last year.
He was also planning to sell this house in Pawtucket to move to a neighborhood in Lincoln where snobby uppity types lived and turned up their noses at anyone who didn’t come from money. He had “arrived” and needed a house that stated that fact.
A year after he was installed as CEO at the bank he was dead. Double bronchial “walking pneumonia” as they called it then, It was the same thing that killed Jim Henson of the Muppets.
Though now, from my talking to Dr’s and the fact my brother had full blown cystic fibrosis and the fact they both died nearly the same age, the Dr’s suspect my Dad may have been just un-diagnosed with CF. There weren’t many great tests for that in the 30s or 40s then so it may have slipped by and the disease can show in strange ways till it finally ramps up and gets you in the last year. Oddly enough, my brother was diagnosed rather very late at 25 when back then they could nail the diagnosis when you were an infant. How he managed to slip through the cracks for so long, neither he nor his doctors at the time could figure out. In one way, it didn’t matter as there was no cure for this, only management till the inevitable came.
So one year of “fun” Dad had with the position, money and dreams.
I took Dad’s knowledge of finance and used his advice, rather cautiously but it yielded some decent results. I also knew that if I didn’t love something well enough, I would never put the 101% effort into it because it “wasn’t worth it” to me. However, IF I did love something...I would. I would pick and choose what I thought was important to me and not some other’s belief on how to live life. Knocking myself out for the supposed sake of it, all the time, with everything, wasn’t gonna happen, and I wasn’t about to race around town in a minvan and then tell myself this is a “full life” because even though I can BS myself rather artfully, this was too much self deception. I can’t lie to myself that badly. If I believe something sucks, it’s real hard for me to convince myself otherwise. When the evidence stares into my face...what other conclusion can I reach?
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