Owed To A Fairy Tale

During retirement there is a crucial responsibility concerning free time. If you start watching movies that end with Hollywood’s optimistic crescendo of affirming life and love, you may need to affix a veil of Kleenex so as to keep your hands free to change the channel for the next one. Then there are these thoughts…




What is wrong with living happily ever after? Culturally the romantic blush wilts as we ‘mature’. Such idealistic notions are fine for adolescents, horny college students, aspiring poets and for the initial onslaught of love. It seems that in order for love to survive long term we must constrain hyperbole with realistic expectations. There must be a reason for contempt being the issue of familiarity, right? Marilyn Monroe died for our inevitable sinning itch of seven years so that we could maintain our tragic imperfection and still give roses on the eighth anniversary.

So which diminishes first? Depth? Breadth? Height? If only Elizabeth Barrett Browning were still with us to give us a clue. There must be some prescription for the kaleidoscope eyes needed to view our partner in a splendiferous eternal fashion that soporifically deludes while preserving harmony and longevity.

Maybe it is true that no one or no thing is perfect and that the blindness of love evolves into an efficient myopia. You know, sort of a cross between Pollyanna and Mr. Magoo. Maybe the truth and beauty of love are a factoid not to be confused with the constancy of 186,000 miles per second. After all we know the speed of light works relative to any speed. How can love compete with that? Its measurement is an oxymoron when penned by Byron or Keats and statistically betrayed by divorce rates.


So perhaps you will have to forgive my eternally nascent adolescent attitude that I aspire to the grail of Cinderella and Quasimodo (wrap your head around that!). Living happily ever after is not a goal. It is, at worst, a delusional condition but at best it is how we serendipitously are. For cripe’s sake, somebody’s gotta live happily after, might as well be me!