Wednesday, July 13, 2011

Today's fortune: July 13, 2011

Today's fortune: Keep true to the dreams of your youth.

If I had kept true to the dreams of my youth, I would be a professional baseball player who practiced architecture on the side, I would own the world's largest collection of yo-yos, drive a 1957 Chevy and be married to Yasmine Bleeth.

Pictured: A '57 Chevy, since my wife wouldn't let me post a picture of Yasmine Bleeth.

Instead, I'm a widget maker who writes about fortune cookies on the side, I own the world's largest collection of losing lottery tickets, I drive a 1998 Dodge Ram and I'm married to a woman much, much more beautiful than Yasmine Bleeth.

Since it would be hard to drop everything and pursue Yasmine, the baseball career and a whole bunch of yo-yos, I'll have to find another way to apply this fortune.

As an adult, our dreams become jaded. Since adults face real-life problems, our dreams often deal with how to alleviate those problems. For example: Jamie and I have faced a small number of financial hurdles in recent months, and ever since those troubles began, I've been dreaming about the day in the near future when we'll be able to put some money into savings.

Wow. Putting money into savings. What a dream. The little-kid version of me would slap me in the face.

But the little-kid version of me didn't have real-life adult problems, either. His biggest concern was "What's for dinner tonight?" - not "Can we afford to eat dinner tonight?"

Back during my childhood, the source of dinner almost every night was a deep-freeze in our basement. Inside that deep freeze was a side of beef, purchased every few months from Bichelmeyer Meats, a butcher shop in Kansas City, Kansas.

Today, to help re-live my childhood days, Jamie and I met my parents and my brother and sister-in-law at the grand old butcher shop. I hadn't been there for a few years; my parents hadn't been there for over a decade.


Bichelmeyer Meats holds a special place in our family story. The shop has expanded quite a bit from when we were frequent customers, but it still feels the same, and even some of the employees are the same from back then. Oh, and the meat? About a billion times better (and, often, cheaper) than you could ever get from the supermarket.


It was good to take a stroll down memory lane today, especially when memory lane passes a beautiful meat counter. That's where my childhood dreams will have to end for now. Unless Jamie lets me teach her how to rock the cradle later.

It's a yo-yo trick. Get your minds out of the gutter.

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