Lemons and Lemonade, Peaches and Cream

I believe the two book titles sum up the problem. Most humans will try both solutions during the course of a life, sometimes many times. Acceptance and making the best or even the improvement of a situation (lemonade) or holding out for the dream (peaches) with all its sometime attendant disruptions and insecurities.

Holding up my hand, I state that I am one who has tried both approaches . Applying the "Peach Principle," at age 42 I sold most of my furniture, packed a few belongings, hopped in a ten-year old Honda Civic, left Durham, N.C., and drove the 3000 miles to San Francisco to visit a dear female friend and settle on the West Coast (but without any job possibilities).

Fortunately, all worked out well. My friend and I decided that we were more than friends and married about a year later. After a few months of initial struggle, I went back to school and eventually started on a new career path. In this case I seemingly held out for the peaches and cream of my dreams. Of course there had been quite a bit of lemonade drunk in the years leading up to the move. In ways the move itself could be viewed as lemonade for some pesky and continuing problems.

Hm-m-m-m, I believe the foregoing was way complex. Let's take a much simpler illustration of the lemon to lemonade principle. My favorite pine tree (one of the major reasons that we bought our house) was literally pulled apart during an ice storm several winters ago. The company that removed the tree chopped the trunk into assorted logs, and we were able to burn our precious tree in the fireplace all winter. See, not just lemonade but a hot toddy of a lemonade. To be fair, I suppose that we could have made memorial benches for the tree out of the logs also.

Well, maybe that was too simple. Let's try again with the peach principle. I went to college with a guy who like me had literary aspirations. We both wrote poetry. He was perhaps more dedicated than I to being "the pure poet." In fact he was determined to hang out in our college town and romantically "starve in the garret" until he made it as a poet. Most admirable. Through the years I would run into him occasionally (and loan him a few bucks of course) when I visited my

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