With age I’ve come to realize that it doesn’t have to be perfect and with hindsight I’ve also realized that it’s been as close to perfect as it ever will get.
How did I get to the first day of February in the year of 2024?
I made a shit ton of mistakes. Made some wrong turns and pissed off more people than I can count.
Though I was never late.
I still have hiccups here and there. I’ve been around the block so many times that I never make a wrong turn and most of the people that I pissed off… I pray to them daily because many of them are in heaven.
I had a guy reach out to me the other day. A guy about twenty years older than me who told me we were related. His grandmother and my great grandmother on my dad’s side were sisters.
He has sent me family photos and told me about some interesting stories in the short time since our paths crossed.
Long story short…..
All the days that I’ve lived and all the stories of my life will someday be told by someone that I don’t know. A relative of a relative of a relative. Someone that is interested in genealogy will come across a Great great, great uncle of a brother who lived from 1966 into the middle of the twenty first century.
He was born in Chicago, Illinois and worked on one of the last open outcry trading floors at the Chicago Board of Trade. He wrote stories around the time when people went from writing on paper to using the original computers of the twentieth century.
That is it….
Someday that will be all my life will amount to. A paragraph in someone’s genealogy hobby.
They will find my birth certificate, a divorce document and my death certificate. They might find a picture of me at an old fashion football game at a stadium that was once on Lake Michigan.
This future relative won’t know all my mistakes or the wrong turns that I made or figure out who I pissed off.
So, I don’t need to reach for perfection. I just need to strive to be good.
Because that future relative might put together what kind of person that I was. I want that paragraph to read that I was a good person. That I was passionate about my faith, my family and my friends.
It will probably come out that I was a Chicago Bears and White Sox fan during the period when they both sucked. It was two years after John Shepley’s death that they both became frequent champions.
Dry January is over suckers. The February rent check is due and Mardi Gras is next week. By the end of the month the sunsets will be close to six o’clock and our shadows will be closer to our bellies.
Go out today and be imperfect and work on the record books to read that you were a good person who made the world better during your time.
…. and let the good times roll!!!
