Thanks for the Twenty

I appreciate your patience in allowing these seemingly disparate vignettes to be woven into a workable, if not perfectly seamless, tapestry.

Part 1) The Young Realtor

Realtors who view their clients and their work as an unrelenting series of losses punctuated by rare big hits are unlikely to be satisfied or successful.

Young Realtor: Are you buying a house?

Potential Client Number One: No.

Young Realtor: Are you selling your house?

Potential Client Number Two: No.

Young Realtor: Are you buying a house?

Potential Client Number Three: Yes, but I gave the listing to my mom.

Young Realtor: Are you selling a house?

Potential Client Number Four: Yes, but I hate you and won’t give you the listing.

After 99 more depressing interactions like these, the young Realtor finally closes a deal and earns two thousand dollars. If he conceptualizes his experience as 99 unpleasant time-wasting interactions followed by an hour in which he earned two thousand dollars, he is doomed to fail in his profession. Who could wake up in the morning and look forward to work knowing that the odds were 99 to 1 against earning any money? To the contrary, our Young Realtor has to say thank you to every one of the 99 folks who turn him down. Every time someone turns him down, he has to say, “Thanks for the twenty.” Every single time he asks someone to be part of a real estate transaction, he earns twenty bucks.

Part 2) As usual, Shakespeare got it right:

“If all the year were playing holidays; To sport would be as tedious as to work.”

–King Henry IV, Part 1

Vaguely lost and soaked in tedium, my kids and I were driving home from yet another nondescript camping trip. Once again, we had missed spotting any charismatic mega-fauna; indeed, once again we had seen no animal larger than a mosquito, a mosquito whose many relatives seemed to have joined us for the car trip home. The food that wasn’t undercooked on the campfire was burnt; the days that weren’t unbearably hot were endlessly rainy; the card games that weren’t scarred by sibling squabbles were at somebody else’s picnic table because my kids couldn’t seem to get through the first nanosecond without bickering. We returned home covered in bug bites, mud, and tediousness. There was a trunkful of gear that needed to be cleaned, organized, and put away. What a complete bother.

If we had given up after the camping trip with the inedible food and the incessant arguments we wouldn’t have gotten to subsequently have been on an interminable canoe ride at low tide through shallow brackish water in the Everglades in oppressive heat and enveloping humidity. Surrounded by muck and mangroves one boring hour after another, we saw no herons and zero wood stocks. Roseate Spoonbills? None. And don’t even ask about red tailed hawks. They, along with the ospreys, had caught the last-hopefully air conditioned-train for the coast. We paddled along in silent monotony happy to know that the car was only a few hundred strokes ahead when there on the bank not fifty feet away was a gargantuan 14-foot Mouther Trucker crocodile. This primordial beast was the next door neighbor of the crocks on the National Geographic special. You know-the half ton killing machines that explode out of the Nile and take out a full grown wildebeest in a death roll. (And don’t insult me by suggesting that we actually saw an alligator because only alligators inhabit Nine Mile Pond in the Everglades. I am a Florida boy, born and bred: I know the difference between an alligator and a crocodile as well as you know the difference between your mom and your dad.) This brute was huge, almost as big as the canoe. At the top of the food chain, the monster eyed us, unconcerned about puny canoeing mammals. We watched as the thousand-pound reptile finished sunning himself and lazily thundered down the bank into the lake like an F-14 landing on an aircraft carrier.

It would be only a slight exaggeration to suggest that the ground shook with each massive step. What a magnificent animal. My kids and I still talk about it, all these years later.

It’s not every day you get to see a crocodile in the wild. Wow.

We can’t look at all the camping trips before The Canoe Trip Where We Saw The Crocodile As Big As A School Bus as a waste of time. Nor were they practice leading up to some subsequent big event. To the contrary, each and every trip was a twenty dollar bill tucked safely away.

***

Parents in my office frequently lament the lack of magical moments with their kids. Where is the emotional intimacy that I felt when they were little? Now that they’re seniors in high school, I hardly see them. Why don’t we talk anymore? Why aren’t they ever at home? And when I do see them, it’s all I can do to get them to take the headphones out of their ears or to stop texting long enough for us to exchange a few sentences.

Here is some gentle advice to counteract the disconnect:

1) Set up inviolate family time. If you drive seven hours across the state to see grandma the week before Thanksgiving every year then by golly you drive seven hours across the state to see grandma at Thanksgiving this year NO MATTER WHAT is going on at the office or if you’re broke or getting divorced or you were kidnapped by aliens.

Similarly, if there are no electronics at the dinner table then there are no electronics at the dinner table. Period.

2) Spend lots of time doing nothing in particular with your kids: No homework, no soccer practice, no car pool, no agenda. Just BE with your kids. (Buddhist irony intended.) Acknowledge that most of these interactions won’t produce any moments worthy of the denouement of a Frank Capra film.

But each evening nothing particularly noteworthy happens and your kid says, “Well, g’night, Dad” think to yourself, “Thanks for the twenty.”