Was It All So Simple Then?

Yesterday turned out to be a day of looking back. I fetched my man Buick after an oil change, and breakfast with Wifey at Mitch's WestSide. The food was horrible, and the place empty -- I'll stick with LOL from now on. Anyway, I started to get ready to head to the office, and then I was the victim of circumstance: "Casino" was playing on cable. "Casino" is one of about 10 moves I watch multiple times -- and, sure enough, before I knew it, 2 hours had passed and the thought of driving to the office had faded. Fortunately, I knew my partner Paul was putting in another of his 50 hour weeks, so I wouldn't be terribly missed... And then I got a call from my old friend Todd. Todd is a Miami native who became a very succesful appellate/trial support lawyer, married a lawyer, had two kids, and then settled into a very comfortable life up in Broward. But his dislike of being a lawyer proved too strong, and he moved his family to Colorado, started writing children's books, and little by little, withdrew from the law business. Since he's left, he took a grad program in pain relief psychology, and has begun treating patients. His wife bakes gluten free cookies... Todd told me he caught up on my blog, and barbed me good naturedly about its happy, all is great and food is served at the Ritz Carlton - content. He's dead on -- I rarely share the darkness in life publicly. Living with anxiety and sadness, as we all do, seems enough without having to share it publicly -- and Todd knows that. Still, we talked for quite a time about the tracks we were on, as middle class Jewish guys who were EXPECTED to become doctors or lawyers -- and how our kids seem freed from that constraint. Todd's son, D2's age, got his degree from Colorado, but is now a full time chef at an Italian place in Boulder. His daughter is a rising academic -- probably Sociology. And Todd and I are still looking for real jobs -- after being spoiled by the relative easy money of law --it's tough to stomach lesser gigs. And we talked about the colorful characters in our past professional lives -- agreeing that lawyers tend to be, as a group, self important blow hards whose primary method of birth control is their personality... And then the nostalgic day continued: Wifey came home from a visit to her Mother, and finally fetched the DVD transfers she made from our old family VHS tapes. We watched one -- it jumped from D1 being two, at a 29th birthday party Wifey had for me where she invited a stripper...and not just ANY stripper, but Wifey would be too angry to have me share that silly story. Yes, this took place with D1 there as a baby, and my Holocaust Survivor in laws in attendance as well -- clearly an event at the top of Wifey's bad ideas department. But the happier videos were D1 opening gifts, and then a time jump to the JCC Summer camp where a gorgeous D2 was 3 and singing with her camp mates... My -- the two decades have flown by. And then there was the final nostalgic event of the day: news came of Nelson MAndela's death. The FaceBook (tm) posts flowed from many of my liberal friends -- writing as if they lost a treasured grandpa. I used to view the world that way -- liberal equals good -- but things to me are no longer so simple. I remembered how Mandela embraced, literally, Arafat, Gadaffi, and Castro. To me --that took away his sainthood. True -- he did a lot for his people -- but was he a truly GREAT man? Not to me. I find most political elections are a choice between who is less of a turd versus who is more of one. But I miss those carefree days of naivite -- when I could truly think guys like Mandela were great in every way. In so many ways, it truly WAS so simple then...but it's still exquisite now.