The Third Option

Living? Or surviving? Are they unsettling questions, these? No, not really.

My friend (and for a short while roommate) Keith hung himself in 1987, his pretty but flirtatious wife having a baby on the way that wasn’t his, that she told him she didn’t know whose it was, whatever that implies. Sometimes life is literally a bitch.

I understood it. In all honesty, quitting was an option which had crossed my mind. Life was hard for my little rat-pack back then, as were decisions. We were young, poor, barely educated… the road ahead had an ominous feel.

Since then I have married and watched our daughter grow into a woman (and two granddaughters as well). I have had the good fortune to travel much of the world with someone I love, have lived vicariously through 5 dogs, have enjoyed success doing something I grew to love as my engagement in it increased, and I am still to this day enjoying George Strait’s music, something my friend Keith, a proud Texan, taught me to appreciate through his “western swing” singing and playing as we killed time in our little apartment way back when. I even bought myself a guitar in homage to Keith, but I never got very good with it. Playing the thing was not as easy as Keith made it appear. Sometimes life is like that. Sometimes we fail as we circumnavigate life… as we survive it.

The clock doesn’t stop when we do. So many minutes, and hours, and days since 1987, not to mention the years. So much time to do, and to be. So much joy and pain delivered in that time. So much life granted.

I’m not too proud. I’ll take survival. It was survival allowed all that living, and both beat hell out of the third option.