Ode to a mortal blue collar working man

     Remember yesterday, the bittersweet kiss of all we have known. Words as clear as glass but the warmth of the sun never reaches us through the clouds in our mind. The touch of true love is left on a childhood playground and only the ignorant will ever know bliss. 

Work to live or is it live to work. Sometimes I wonder and rightly so or so I say. Push and shove through every day in that mad rush to be where the grim reaper waits to meet you. Hope for that fifteen minutes of fame.

And in the end as we lay in the bed of our own making that we wish we could unmake, we realize that through it all, very few things remain constant. The search for true love and memories past. The realization that you never found bliss in your ignorance and that blood is indeed thicker than water and all the pain your mistakes have caused proves this.

Unrequited love in all the wrong places and unquestioned love from those who you know as family. And the darkness calls out to claim us all. A world full of uncertainty, cruel and unforgiving and the constant battle to stay out from under the churning wheels of progress. Day in and day out until the day we die. Danger, fear and uncertainty at every turn, life we often wonder why we bother to call it that. But that is what we strive to make it.

So many things we ignore and take for granted as we look through the eyes of our youth. Every day we fight up the stream of our lives to get where we think we want to be and when time makes us older and with a little luck, wiser we find we have become what we hated most in our parents and it isn’t so bad after all.

For the most part.

We fought, we struggled. We laughed and cried and shared to become part of all we chose to experience. Racing like madmen, as far away from where we were to find out in the end that was the only place we wanted to be.

Not old but aged in wisdom.

Not angry for not seeing it sooner but thankful that life finally found a way to reveal it to eyes that refused to see it in the beginning.

The smile of a small child of your making. The breeze through the trees on a warm fall evening and the touch of a woman you knew wasn’t the true love from your youth but somehow ended up being the one you couldn’t live without. The clang of spoons in a cereal bowl and the next generation rushing so not to be late for their day of self-realization. A look of admiration and disgust at a parental kiss and a new day begins.

Youth and aged wisdom going forth into the same world to walk the paths that call to them. Youth, pent up frustration and dreams that call from a distant fire.

Look at them. I’ll never be like that. And aged wisdom knowing that one day that is just what they’ll be, just like me.

It’s good to be aged. It’s good to be wise. It’s good to be out of the raging stream we fought so hard to get to. Ponds are good, as our children will one day know. And most of all, when the day has done all it can do, it’s good to be home. Click, click, click…..no place like home.

Smell that Friday fresh air. It’s good to be me, right now.

Hell, anytime.

(Ode to a mortal blue collar working man by the Zen Baboon)