All Good Dreams...

There was a fourteen year old boy that I knew about twenty years ago. He was kind of a geek, and wasn’t sure what was going on in his head a lot of the time, (who does at that age?) but he was mostly all right with that.

Then one chilly autumn day he was strolling across a community soccer field near where he lived, and as he stepped through the stubbly, yellowing grass and dying weeds it came to him: When he was old enough, he was going to move away from this place.

He always loved swimming and had been fond of the sea for as far back as he could remember. The first time he had walked on a beach and smelled that fresh, invigorating ocean air was back in ’79 when his parents took him on a rail trip out to Vancouver. Ever since the day he strolled along Jericho Beach with his parents, the sea had stayed in his blood.

Years later on that autumn day at age fourteen he knew what he wanted to do. He knew his dream was to one day live in Vancouver by the ocean he had always loved, side by side with the girl he most cared for.

The boy blinked and suddenly he was thirty-four and realized he had wasted the best years of his adult life slaving away for The Man, and spending precious little time indeed on his passion, his art, his writing, his dreams. He was with the girl he most cared for, but he was still stuck in the dry, prairie dust bowl where he’d spent most of his life.

It was on an autumn day, much like the one twenty years ago, that the thirty-four year old man realized that his dreams of living by the sea with the girl he most cared for would never come to fruition.

Through a series of incidents beyond his control, the cards just never seemed to come up aces for him as they had with so many of his friends. Of course he was free to leave the dust-bowl any time he wanted, the girl he most care for made that perfectly clear, but for reasons that were beyond his understanding, she would never go with him to the promised lands beside the ocean. And life without her would shatter his heart into a million pieces, of this he was certain.

And so it was on that day, with a fat, burning lump in his throat, that he went out for a stroll to a small park near his flat to swing on the swings, teeter on the tooter, sit on the bench, and bury his dreams forever.

For what is the point of trying to live your dream, if in the end you wind up sad, naked, alone, and broken?