Be Careful What You Talk About With Your Children

Things you and your children talk about come haunting back years later. For example, a while ago, Sarah told me I was a "sad little man".  I was thinking about that yesterday, because all day delivering mail, I had a sad little obsession with  Triscuits, and by 9 pm I'd eaten an entire box of them. Not exactly the sort of midlife self-evaluation that results in a hospital for Sudan or even a new Corvette. Maybe it would seem a little grander accomplishment, if I mention that I also ate an entire box of chocolate covered macadamia nuts in bed last night. Oh, the shame, when I got up this morning and stepped on the empty wrappers in the unforgiving dark.
If midlife crises were literally midlife, then I should be dead anyway, since at  twenty eight I was struck by the fact that in twelve years I'd be forty, and if I didn't do something, I'd still be working at the post office. I still am, twenty eight years later.