Take Advantage Of Your Opportunities When You Get Them

My philosphiphical advice for the day is to always be on the lookout for opportunities and to take advantage of them when they arise. In particular, I’m thinking about this in terms of the simple things, especially the ones that you just assume that will ALWAYS be there tomorrow if you pass them up today.

My example that got me thinking about this is the classic ice cream truck. You know, big and boxy, covered with stickers advertising ice cream sandwiches, creamcicles, bomb pops, and frozen Snickers, window on the side, usually with a cheesy, awful tune playing over a loud speaker system so that you could hear them coming from blocks away. When we were kids, that cheesy, tinkly, annoying music gave us time to go harass our parents for a couple of dollars and still have time to go running out into traffic to get run over trying to catch up to the truck. If we were particularly industrious, during the summer we would go walking along 72nd Street, scouring the weeds along the road for discarded Coke bottles that we could redeem for nickles at Pitko’s General Store, saving that change so that we could have our own money for the ice cream truck.

At our old house on Pomelo, the streets were flat and we were about five houses down the street from the elementary school, so we would have the ice cream truck by almost daily during the summer, every year. I would always hear it and always be busy, so I always figured that I would go out and catch the truck and get a random, spontaneous ice cream treat some other time in the future. Tomorrow. Or the next day. Next week, maybe. Next month…

Six years ago we moved to this house, which is at the top of a really long, steep hill that the ice cream truck might or might not be able to actually get up, and we’re nowhere near a school. Thus, NO ice cream trucks here. EVER.

And something made me think about that and realize that I had the opportunity almost daily for DECADES and I almost never took advantage of those opportunities. And now I’m out of luck.

Something else to check out when we’re shopping for the Forever Home. And you can bet if I find out that we’re on a regular path for an ice cream truck, I’ll be dropping everything and sprinting out for an ice cream sandwich when I hear that tinny, electronic circus tune. If I happen to be in the middle of a work Zoom meeting? C’est la vie! A guy’s gotta do what a guy’s gotta do! I’ll be older and wiser the next time.