Twenty-Five

I dreamed a lot when I was young, my mind still wanders to this day, so much I wanted to achieve, so much that I yearned to stay. Was once a wide-eyed optimist, believed I’d do it all with class, but like most starstruck dreamers I was soon put down on my ass. To make dreams real is every hard, and I was soon to understand that Life enjoys nothing more than knocking down a dreaming man. The first time I went door-to-door selling boxes of my cookies, tweaks on a family secret 5hat my grandmother left to me. I made good money those first days, ’till the inspector came around, said I had to get a permit to do business inside this town. Then in college I made a pitch to a venture capitalist guy, h he laughed so had he might as well have spit right into my eye. Then a professor learned that I dreamed of success in business, mocked me in the lecture hall, said,”There is something wrong with this!” After college I got a store, but the banks wouldn’t give a loan, lost the place before it opened had to take a job selling phones! Those were just a few of the hits that Life had waiting for me, it wasn’t just the professional, my first real girlfriend liked to cheat! My car broke down at the worst time, my landlord kept raising my rent, my half-brother got deep in debt, never repaid the money I lent. Life flattened me again and again, and every time I felt it burn, but the pain hurt less with every blow, and swiftly I started to learn. From the permit guy I did learn not to get in bed with the state. From the professors I learned all-too-well not to trust what ‘elites’ might say. From the failed store I learned to look for new ways, so I went online, from selling phones I soon picked up how to see when a person might buy. All those hits that laid me out flat showed me that you won’t die from grit, and the only way Life wins the fight is if you just lay there and quit. Life has hit me twenty-four times, but I have gotten up twenty-five, My cookies sell in six hundred stores, for two hundred more I just signed. My income has, for the first time, gone beyond the six-figured mark. I’ve found a wife better than most, have a son that now drives my heart. So dear Life, if you want twenty-five, if you still need to act all tough, better kill me, because otherwise I am just going to get back up.