Let's Get Started

It's 2018. I will turn fifty-six this year. My son will be twenty-one. I will have been married for twenty-five years. This presents a unique algebraic opportunity to examine the trend in my life. For example, I had been married four years when our son was born. This is interesting to me, since it has seemed to me that those years that my wife and I spent alone in that one bedroom apartment were more numerous. It's a time thing, messed up further by the appearance of this young man on our front porch. The one claiming to be our little boy.
It's 2018. I still haven't acquired my forklift operator's certificate. It would have been a simple enough task way back when I worked at a book warehouse. It might have taken me a week to accomplish, but I got stuck doing other things, like personnel and two tours on the board of directors. To be more precise, I stuck myself to other things. Now I find myself longing for that little bit of validation that says, in a pinch, that I could operate that piece of heavy machinery, providing I had not consumed too much cough syrup just prior.
It's 2018. I have left this country five times in the course of my life. I have traveled to Mexico four times, which seems like a lot. The fifth time was a quick dash into Canada on a car trip back from New York City where my father took his sons to see Niagara Falls and a shopping mall across the border where I purchased a deerstalker cap as a souvenir. I left this continent once to spend a week in Hawaii with my wife. I lost my wedding ring. It could be this "I Love Lucy"-ness of traveling is what keeps me close to home.
It's 2018. I am six months away from finishing my twenty-first year of teaching. This is one of those time pieces that continues to boggle me. After spending a long time doing jobs that were not generally considered long term positions, I find myself being asked when I might retire. This was not a question that came up around my five year stint at the video store. Or the four years I spent moving and assembling modular office furniture. Those were my twenties. Of course no one asked. And yet I stuck around. I kept waiting for someone to tell me to leave. As yet, no one has told me to leave teaching, so there I will stay. For now.
It's 2018. We have approximately ten months before midterm elections. It would be nice if my son, whose first election brought him Donald Trump, could feel good about the ballot he will cast. This is a year that could change the current course of the country I am too afraid to leave. 2018 could be a new beginning. It could be a chance to remind us all just how great America always has been and will be for years to come.
It's 2018. Let's get started.