The Best Days of Our Lives

A week ago, as part of my process of capturing title ideas on which to write stories, I heard someone reference the best days of their lives and I wrote it down as a title for a story, not really thinking at the time, exactly what it was that I would be writing about. That is just one of the many quirky things about the way I write and how I manage to do what my friend Gary finds hard to comprehend, which is coming up with topics to write about on a daily basis. I have other friends like Arthur that think I just blather on too much about too many things and friends like Cliff who glances at the first few sentences of my stories and then decides if he is interested or not (I have warned him that sometimes the best part comes at the end, so maybe he should read the punch line instead….). But anyway, I put up this title and then I went about my business and wrote a bunch of stories before again stumbling on this title and the blank page below it. It almost seemed too prophetic to suggest that one can specify the best days of one’s life and then forget to write it all down, presumably because you are too busy living your best life.

Nevertheless, make no mistake about it, these are far and away the best days of my life and I know that for many reasons. It mostly relates to Kim and all that she gives me and brightens my life with, but there are other things as well. I just now got a call from my expert witness partner telling me that for the second time in as many weeks, I have been selected for a very big expert witness assignment. One of those is battling a major bank in a very specific lawsuit and the most recent is a series of class action suits that are battling with all the major players on Wall Street. That would be the same place that I worked as a part of for many many years. In fact, while I do both plaintiff and defendant work, I have certainly done lots of work against this same general group of entities that represent the major players in the U.S. financial markets. It’s not that I am being enlisted on that side of the battle that makes me feel that this is part of my best life, but rather that at age 72 (almost), I have managed to stay relevant enough in my chosen field to be hired at attractive rates of compensation to gather my thoughts, express my opinions and advocate my perspective in one of the best legal systems in the world. What more does any professional want in life than to have his or her opinion valued highly enough to be deployed in that way? That value being applied to one’s judgement doesn’t leave too much room to improve upon in a professional sense. So, at this moment I am feeling like I have the best of both the personal and the professional worlds working for me.

Now that I think about it, I think the catchphrase came to me when someone was referencing their days in high school or college as the best days of their lives. I recall hearing that on and off all through my life. When I went to prep school in Maine for a year I remember one of the other guy’s father (a man who was an alumnus of the prep school himself) tell his son that these would be the best years of his life. When you watch movies like Stand By Me, you hear the narrator (Richard Dreyfuss in that case) say, “I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve. Jesus, does anyone?” That pretty much suggests that being twelve was the best time of the writer’s life. Another nostalgic movie that makes me feel like that is Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It. It ends with the lines, “Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world’s great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of those rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs.” We are left with the view that Maclean’s days on the Blackfoot River in Montana were his best days.

It seems appropriate to reference that great movie today, given the death overnight of Robert Redford, the man who brought that great story to the screen and who spent all of his best days in Provo Canyon, Utah. In 1961, while driving from New York to Los Angeles, Redford passed through the beautiful Wasatch Mountains of Utah and fell in love with the area. He bought two acres of land in what is now Sundance for $500 and built a cabin on that spot by himself.  He later bought 5,000 acres more there after he filmed Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. His Utah days were Redford’s best days of his life.

People are forever looking back to the past and attributing it as the best days of their lives, which is very understandable. But as we have seen in movies like The Best Years of Our Lives, the 1946 Dana Andrews/Myrna Loy classic about the trauma of returning veterans after the war, sometimes those rose-colored glasses are just that, a distortion of the reality. I’m not so sure that the old days were ever better than what we have going for us now. Obviously, there are exceptions, but other than the benefits of youth, I’m pretty sure in the last few hundred years things have been on a solid progression of things getting better and better. One of the great men I have known, my step-father who married my mother when they were in their 70’s, Irving Jenkins, used to always say when asked how he was doing…”Better and better.” That’s the attitude we should all take with regard to both how we are doing at any given moment and how we view the days of our lives. Make no mistake…these are always the best days of our lives.