Long Ago Things Were Simple

The warm summer day held a blue sky void of clouds. A lazy afternoon at work for me, a furniture delivery man, in which I was spending my day on only three deliveries which were in three different directions meaning lots of drive time. Ray Parker Jr. was singing "You can't change that" on the radio, lulling me into a dreamy state where I was thinking about the girl I was madly in love with, and planning our future together. Of course I would somehow have to come up with the courage to ask her out first, but that was a minor detail not even entering my thoughts at the moment. My delivery partner was a horrible driver and right now he was sitting in the driver's seat. Luckily I was awake enough to see that he had fallen asleep and was running off the road going down a very steep hill. I yelled and his head snapped back up in time to jerk the van back onto the road. That was all the excitement I wanted right then... on that perfect day... with my perfect dreams.

I was living at home at that time and putting away some money, despite having payments on a still fairly-new car and a brand new motorcycle. I could come and go as I pleased. Work was actually a fun part of my day at that point. I had lost weight from my high school days- just a couple of years before- and was even called "skinny" for the first time in my life. I knew that these were the best days of my life so far and looked forward to even better ones.
Soon things would change, and not in the way I had hoped. I would meet a girl who would become my wife and we would make a life together, but not without many many stressful, trying times. My parents, who I had never thought would leave, would depart this world, my mother being the first to go just a couple of years after the clear, bright summer day when I was planning my future. My own sanity would be pushed to its limit as panic and anxiety, which were unknown to me before this, took control of a large portion of my life. Children would enter the picture and bring many joys and many trials.The outside world would change too, bringing new technologies but also new, unforeseen problems.......Twenty five years or so later the world is not as I had pictured it would be.

Long ago, on a summer day, a young man with a simple life full of dreams knew that he was living in a perfect world.