And we're lousy at it.
When I was 16, my dream career was in stand-up comedy, but I also had some grand aspirations in writing television advertising. It looked like Tom Hanks had a pretty good job in Nothing in Common and if one could wind up with Sela Ward, that wouldn't be too shabby. The plan was to live in New York, buy Jets season tickets, and buy a glass front refrigerator--like the ones you get a coke out of at Wawa or 7-11. I don't why, but something about those sliding glass doors epitomized cool urban décor.
Well, if everyone found gainful employment in their childhood dream career, we'd probably have a lot less accountants and a lot more firemen and astronauts. So I never wrote any ad copy, never got the cool fridge, and alas, Sela Ward as of yet has not returned any of my phone calls.
Herein lies the humor for me, I was dead wrong at 16 about where I'd be at 36 and I'm probably wrong now about where I'll be at 56. I sat down with a financial planner the other day and she asked me where I'd like to be in 10 years. My answer including things like a owning a nice house, saving for children to go to college, setting up to retire well, etc. And as sat outside Starbucks searching for answers for Laura to compile in her wealth accumulation worksheet, I probably didn't mention the most salient thing about my future life.
After we'd been out west for a couple months, we had dinner with one of my old friends. Cynthia and I go way back--our parents lived in the same apartment complex, received the honorary non-biological aunt and uncle monikers, got rich and moved to the suburbs together, and we spent every major holiday together. Cynthia and I were the same age and paralleled each other in school, periodically sharing same teachers and competing for the same attention. Since high school, we'd only seen each other at my wedding and our high school reunion.
Yet there we were on a warm September evening, dining on Pacific cuisine at a restaurant on Shelter Island--a couple of Upstate New York kids separated by 3000 miles and 20 years.
Cynthia realized this absurdity.
"If you told me in high school that someday I'd be having dinner with you and your wife in San Diego, California, I would have thought you were crazy."
Exactly.
