Perhaps the best day of my life was graduation from high school. It was an exciting and anticipated day. I was very happy when it happened and to top off the glorious event, I met a beautiful girl at a celebratory dinner afterward.
But why was I happy?
It was because I didn’t like school. Graduation was escaping what I disliked, not a step toward anything. I graduated with very few prospects for my future. My parents had told me years earlier I wasn’t going to college and I was ignorant to other ways to further one’s education than one’s parents paying the bill. I left high school looking for any old job I might scrounge up, but jobs were scarce that year. I would say high school graduation really wasn’t the best day of my life.
Yes, but what about that beautiful girl? I did begin dating her. I was madly in love with that beautiful girl, but at the end of summer she dropped me with the falling leaves of fall. She broke my heart. With all the pain at the end of that relationship, I can hardly count meeting her the best day of my life.
What about these days: getting my first job, buying my first house and the first time my wife got pregnant. These seem like reasonable candidates for my better days, yet each came with a “but”. The jobwasn’t what I had trained or applied for so was a let down, the first house bought turned into the first home we lost leaving us financially worse off and the first pregnancy delivered a dead child.
What were my real best Days? Certainly I would list my wedding to the woman who has been my wife and closest friend these last 47 years. I would count equally the births of my three children as best days. Almost everyone would probably say the birth of a child was one of their best days, but there were circumstances surrounding these births making them more best. (Sometime I will tell that story.)
To paraphrase Charles Dickens: My best times were my worst times. It stands to reason, my worst times will prove to be my best times.
Well, we'll see.
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