Dramatis Personae (Part Shichi)

Have you ever given up? We gave up. We knew that we couldn't make it, so why waste the energy?

Life had dealt us a stiff hand. We knew that no matter what we did, how we lived, we'd die anyway. We thought of our friend. Healthy as a horse into old age. Drank eight glasses of water a day. Swallowed a tablespoonful of cod liver oil. Ran ten miles. Did a hundred sit-ups and push-ups before and after running. And then cancer came and took our friend, forced us to watch a slow and painful death- and this was someone that had done it right.

So, we figured. What the hell? If our friend didn't drink or smoke or eat unhealthily or party all night and still died, what difference did it make if we abstained from all those? Health just wasn't a good enough reason.

So we went out. We drank ourselves silly. We smoked in spades. We partied. We didn't care what we ate, or when, or how much. It was futile anyway. Why grow old and die slowly when we could die young and quickly? Who really cared anyway?

But it wasn't good enough for us either. We needed a greater reason to live. Life was not about who could make it to the grave the fastest, nor was it about who could avoid it the longest. It was about living well the time allotted to us.

But we didn't know how to do that. Our ideas all seemed too small for such a piddly unremarkable existence. So we quit. We gave up.

We got stable jobs. We got married. We had children. We went to book clubs and tee ball. And then one morning, we woke up and found that our lives had past us by. The life we had been so eager to begin living was gone. Forever. Despair closed its cold fingers around our throats.

Despair.

Finally our generation could understand the word. So desperate, in fact, that we couldn't even convince ourselves to try.

FIN
(Or is it?)
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Breaking the continuity for a moment, I feel I must share this. D turned me on to Writer's Almanac, and I immediately looked up the listing for my birthday this year. Here is what was published that day (I thinks it's very me):

Poems: "Essential" and "Employed" by Beverly Rollwagen, from She Just Wants.

Essential
She just wants to keep her essentia
lsorrow. Everyone wants her to
be happy all the time, but she doesn't
want that for them. There is value in
the thread of sadness in each person.
The sobbing child on an airplane, the
unhappy woman waiting by the phone,
a man staring out the window past his wife.
A violin plays through all of them,
one long note held at the beginning and
the end.

Employed
She just wants to be employed
for eight hours a day. She is not
interested in a career; she wants a job
with a paycheck and free parking. She
does not want to carry a briefcase filled
with important papers to read after
dinner; she does not want to return
phone calls. When she gets home, she
wants to kick off her shoes and waltz
around her kitchen singing, "I am a piece
of work."