~a column by Colleen O’Brien
This above quote came to me through a friend who apparently has a connection with Hallmark.
Doesn’t one get over thinking life should be perfect the first time you do the best coloring job in the coloring book but your sister gets the compliment? This actually happened, of course, or I wouldn’t be mentioning it. Dad was judging two of his three daughters’ coloring efforts (fool, he), and the result went something like this.” Well, Collie, I think your coloring is the neatest, but blue and green don’t go together, so Dee Dee wins.” It was then I discovered life was not perfect, nor was my parent. If he’d been perfect, he would have chosen me. Or, if he’d been smart, he’d have chosen both of us, the “tie” that binds. Poor Dad needed a little help in the diplomacy department.
It isn’t that “life does not have to be perfect,” it’s that life just isn’t.
Once we get that into our prince and princess heads, we are all better off. What we know soon enough is that life is sometimes or momentarily or often enough . . . perfect; and these are the moments we hang onto that will carry us through all the imperfect moments, which is most of life.
I know that perfect moments vary wildly between males and females, most of these probably unmentionable but many of them known to all. The triple play is now a unisex possibility; when I was a kid, I didn’t get to try out for Little League and seldom was chosen for the pick-up games in boys’ front yards near me, so my chance of that particular infield ballet of the triple play in my girl-centered life had more to do with playing Jacks than baseball. But I knew a little boy who was involved with one of those amazing feats, and he never got over it.
The dance classes of our youth had no boys in them, so the praised pirouette was probably not a known entity for any of the boys I knew, but to the little girl in her pink tutu praised by the pretty young dance mistress . . . well, “Swan Lake” was on her horizon and even though she took lessons for only a year, she walked like a ballet dancer the rest of her life.
What I’ve learned in my seniority about the perfect life is that it comes at a glance, sneaks up on me and appears before me as shadow of leaves on my living room floor. Or it’s a sphinx moth hovering near my hand. It’s not really big stuff, at all, but the daily miracles of nature, which include human nature, too.
A friend who grasps my hand at the right moment or the mystery person who left pretty gourds and lush tomatoes on my back step – perfect.
Life does not have to be perfect, but I know it has perfect moments. Now and then; that’s good enough for me.
