Except When It Isn't

"Being good and doing good is good, except when it isn't."

Larry--the first one--said that fifty-one years ago when we dated briefly. Good to Larry meant 100% self actualization in one's own life. Make yourself happy first, be true to who you are not who others want you to be, and if there's anything left over for others, it's okay to give that away, or not. Doing good for others, being good for others, sacrificing for others was a religious conspiracy to earn your way into Heaven. Preachers were knowingly feeding their congregation lies about the promise of a wonderful place after death where streets are paved in gold and there's enough chocolate for everyone.  Abide by the rules of the church and Heaven will be waiting for you. All lies, Larry said. The promises were merely a tool to control and manipulate those who believed. It was a trap that people fell into willingly. And what's worse, they lived an unhappy, unfulfilled life and never figured out they were doped. 

I believed. So did my mother, step-father, aunt, uncle, sister and everyone else I knew. We all believed. Even when some of the rules didn't make sense, we obeyed them anyway. We were sheep to the shepherd, our preacher, the man who had a personal conversation with the big guy everyday. Since he was communicating directly with God, that took pressure off of us. We could check our thinking hats at the altar and let our shepherd lead us to safety.

Larry's philosophy on living a self-serving life, focusing on your needs ahead of others, was foreign to me. It ran against who I believed I was: Sugar and spice and everything nice, a doer of good things, an accommodator, a giver, a non-confrontational woman. If being all of those things meant I had to sacrifice or suffer or work harder or do things I didn't want to do, so be it. It was the price I would have to pay in order to fulfill my fairy tale dream of finding my prince and living happily-ever-after in a cute little cottage with a white picket fence.

"Being good and doing good is good, except when it isn't." Larry again with his self-serving nonsense. "When is it ever not good to be good?" I asked him. "You'll find out," he said, "someday when you start thinking for yourself."

***

My first love is history; so is my second.  And so on down the road I must travel "being and doing good" and looking here, there, and over yonder for my next one and only true love. He is out there, somewhere. He will see me and notice how good I am, and then he'll throw the saddle on his horse and say, "Gitty up, King. We have us a maiden to rescue." 

Yep, that's how this story begins when the cowboy noticed a maiden standing in cow poop outside his barn one winter day in 1980.