I’M A SORE LOSER WHEN IT comes to board games. And I’ll never forget the wet weekend decades ago when my boys beat me at ‘Monopoly’. It was no small matter, this fight-to-the-death. Pride was at stake – and, if necessary, blood would be shed!
We sat around that table for hours, hearts pounding and heads throbbing. At one point, I was in front – but these kids showed no mercy. They ganged-up on their father, mortgaged me to the hilt, and snatched my properties without even apologising.
“You’re losing your touch, Dad,” they teased as I went to jail yet again. And before I could get out, I was broke.
It was their moment of glory, a high point in their pathetic little lives. And they celebrated my defeat with much yahooing.
But then guess what happened …?
IT ALL WENT BACK IN THE BOX!
Park Lane, Mayfair, Regent Street and Railways … hotels, houses and hundred-dollar notes … it all went back in the box!
Which, when you think about it, is kinda how LIFE works. When the game comes to an end (and it does, sooner or later, for each of us), it all goes back in the box! All our dreams and plans and achievements … all the stuff we long for, work our butts off for, and lose sleep over. It’s not really ours. We just get to use it for a while. And then …?
Well, it all goes back in the box.
Sobering, eh! I mean, at the end of the day, who cares if we make a LIVING, but fail to make a LIFE? And what does it matter if we win the money AND the bag … but leave this world not knowing why we came into it?
JOHN HAS BEEN GRAPEVINE’S PUBLISHER FOREVER. WELL, MAYBE NOT QUITE THAT LONG. BUT OUR 42ND BIRTHDAY IS COMING UP. NOT BAD FOR A MAGAZINE, EH?
