Have the good sense to flee perfection

Recently we’ve had early morning showers followed by bright balmy days which made for wonderful evenings to sit outside until late and wax long and hard about life like you did when you were in college. Days like that are almost perfect, so of course you immediately pack your bags.

Perfection produces distance thunder---a warning of pending storms. The moment one experiences the perfect and the ideal you realize with dread that the inevitable decline of life is just ahead---any day now--- better to get an early start on it. So I drove to Greenville in eastern North Carolina where the weather was unseasonably cool with light drizzling rain. This is perfect for sitting inside sharing coffee with my mother and growling about the awful weather.

Greenville has East Carolina University with its medical school which attracts thousands of people from all over the world. Most are young with flat abdominal muscles, their life bankrolled by someone else so they are happy and have no mortgage or lower back pain.

Sitting at a stoplight I am struck by the beauty of a girl with long black hair walking along the sidewalk. She has Asian features with high cheekbones and skin which is carefully and frequently moisturized. Her blue shirt clings to her in the misty rain. She travels on long slender legs that were poured into tight fitting white jeans. An elderly man in a grey pin striped business suit holds an umbrella over his head and watches her. The man stares at this young goddess as she walks by him, she nods politely and then suddenly she is gone out of his life forever. He looks a bit wistful. You should not live in a college town when you past the age of fifty unless you are prepared for disappointments and regrets.

My mind ponders disappointments as I pass a golf course now empty in the drizzling rain. Golf is a game of disappointment capable of producing sudden moments of self loathing and thunderous anger that hurls a nine iron into the nearest water hazard. And it’s all done in a beautiful quiet pastoral setting.

But golf is a wonderful benefit to society as it’s ranks are filled with corporate lawyers, politicians and CEO’s who, if they spent their time in the office, just think of all the damage they would do. Therefore municipal golf courses would be a wonderful investment in our future and well being. I am amazed at how much people will pay to go to a place so they can suffer.

I don’t play golf anymore. I dabble in the arts now which gives me all the opportunities to suffer that a man can bear. There is nothing like spending days writing a story that turns out to be a public disappointment or produces little response. You never got off the tee. Then some newbie writes a book, for fun she says, about different shades of grey and masochistic sex and it’s a New York Times best seller. Your wife reads it and one night you find stainless steel handcuffs on the nightstand. You want to say bad things and hurl your pen into a lake.

But travel levels the playing field, available to almost anyone. You sit in a strange city, sip coffee and for a little while you have no past and no responsibilities. You see beautiful people, gain a different perspective on life and acquire fresh ideas. One day we will look back and be amazed at the things we’ve done and experienced if every now and then we have the good sense to flee perfection.