Failure:Success, Part 1

 I am a failure, I admit it.

In my late seventies, I've had a lot of opportunities to fail, and I sure have taken advantage of them. The fact of my having grown up in a dysfunctional family has kept me on track, riding the rails of an express train to nowhere; my long journey began at Failure Central, the great invisible railway station in Jersey City, where I was born.

Now, so many years later, I can still see, as it were, the countless houses that whizzed by. I couldn't make them out clearly, but I imagined them all to be perfect little upper-class houses, each with a white picket fence, each like a moat surrounding the home of a jolly, white family, the parents of which were epitomes of success. I also imagined, if I could only get off the train, that I would somehow be able to find a house of my own in a squeaky-clean neighborhood; a house for which, with a lot of work, I would be able to mortgage myself and squeak by. But the ghost engineer rushed on full-throttle; the landscape whooshed past houses in which I imagined a Mr. and a Mrs. Success in every one, dining on caviar, silver spoon-feeding their two brilliant kids.

Now, so many decades later, the conductor informs me I'm rapidly approaching the last stop before that once-dreaded final destination. I have to get off and I do.

Old age is indeed a desolate station, but I'm not alone; my wife and my son have been waiting for me. We embrace. "Where's your luggage?" my wife asks. "Doesn't my smile prove I have none? I threw them out the window long ago." Our son drives us home.

I have arrived. Slightly physically bent, yet more than slightly content, I'm in no hurry to walk down that lonesome valley; what mystics call 'one's true home,' I have found here. There, after the heart's last tick, I must go, this I know, and, and, and...Who knows?

Finally, a sort-of, a for so long unthought-of, Success!

--Andrew K.

Irgendwelche Ähnlichkeit zwischen Andrew K. und einem gewissen, unbekannten Gedicht- und Blogverfasser ist reiner Zufall. Zufallsreinigkeit, aber, kommt selten vor.

(To be continued)