If Wishes Were Horses...

Poseur

Lots of wishes today, the foremost being I wish it would stop raining! This is supposed to be a desert, averaging 8" of precipitation a year. Things should be in the ground by now, growing.

I wish I could retire. I'm so ready. The only alternative would be to teach college rather than high school, but I'm so not going to get an MFA at my age.

I wish I were smart and clever, rather than merely glib. Well, nothing can be done about that.

I wish I were home--not in winter, of course, unless it were possible to escape to somewhere warm for a month or two and live in Montana for the rest of eternity.

I wish I had calculated everything differently, but then I wouldn't be the strange person I turned out to be, and even my wishes would  have been different.

I wish I could figure out what I want to be when I grow up--oh, wait, I'll never grow up.

I wish my kids were closer, and that I wasn't the only one of my family stuck in this cultural wasteland of Eastern Oregon. I'm so tired of living here like a fish out of water.

I wish the world were a better place, that humans could just get along with each other, without differences in ideology, color, ethnicity, language--whatever minutiae divides us--getting between us and being human.

But then, we are doomed to repeat history, not because we don't know it, but because that's what we do.