God grant me the Serenity
to accept the things I cannot change…
Courage to change the things I can
And Wisdom to know the difference.

--The Serenity Prayer

I love the night sky. Give me the brilliance of myriads of stars against the velvety blackness of the night. I should move to the desert where the isolation and paucity of city lights allow me to erect an observatory and revel in the sky every evening.

Of course, there are not many ways to make a living in. . . oh let's say Rachel, Nevada, and, besides, I am a few years a way from retirement, and my spouse and I cannot afford to give up our jobs. Hey, how do I fulfill my dream and contribute to support of my wife, dog, cat, four goldfish and two catfish?

Easy! When life hands you a lemon, just make lemonade.

So, Tom, you cannot move to the desert at this time; you could join the local astronomy club and on the weekends you and Joyce could go on wonderful outings to the local parks with the club. Joyce would learn the names of the constellations and how to find the North Star. You would all take turns viewing the Lesser Magellanic Cloud through the really classy telescopes that the club or its members own. You don't even have to invest any money in fine optical telescopes and binoculars. Furthermore, you and Joyce would make many new friends. You may even get a great job offer through the contacts you have made through the club. From the new job with the better pay, you may even be able to afford desert vacations or throw up a small A-frame vacation cottage on some of the cheap land available in the Southwest.

Now that is one way to make lemonade when handed a lemon. Sometimes it works as beautifully and clearly as it does in the example above. Sometimes though I wonder if I have squeezed the lemons and spooned in the sugar too many times and settled for lemonade when I should have been holding out for "peaches and cream."

A few years ago there was a book published called, "How to Work for a Jerk," a tome purporting to show us wage slaves how to cope with terrible bosses. The book was a bestseller. Not more than a year later another book appeared on the best seller lists. It was called "How to Be Your Own Boss…and Never Work for a Jerk."

I believe the two book titles sum up the problem. Most humans will try both solutions during the course of a life, sometimes many times. Acceptance and making the best or even the improvement of a situation (lemonade) or holding out for the dream (peaches) with all its sometime attendant disruptions and insecurities.

Holding up my hand, I state that I am one who has tried both approaches . Applying the "Peach Principle," at age 42 I sold most of my furniture, packed a few belongings, hopped in a ten-year old Honda Civic, left Durham, N.C., and drove the 3000 miles to San Francisco to visit a dear female friend and settle on the West Coast (but without any job possibilities).

Fortunately, all worked out well. My friend and I decided that we were more than friends and married about a year later. After a few months of initial struggle, I went back to school and eventually started on a new career path. In this case I seemingly held out for the peaches and cream of my dreams. Of course there had been quite a bit of lemonade drunk in the years leading up to the move. In ways the move itself could be viewed as lemonade for some pesky and continuing problems.

Hm-m-m-m, I believe the foregoing was way complex. Let's take a much simpler illustration of the lemon to lemonade principle. My favorite pine tree (one of the major reasons that we bought our house) was literally pulled apart during an ice storm several winters ago. The company that removed the tree chopped the trunk into assorted logs, and we were able to burn our precious tree in the fireplace all winter. See, not just lemonade but a hot toddy of a lemonade. To be fair, I suppose that we could have made memorial benches for the tree out of the logs also.

Well, maybe that was too simple. Let's try again with the peach principle. I went to college with a guy who like me had literary aspirations. We both wrote poetry. He was perhaps more dedicated than I to being "the pure poet." In fact he was determined to hang out in our college town and romantically "starve in the garret" until he made it as a poet. Most admirable. Through the years I would run into him occasionally (and loan him a few bucks of course) when I visited my alma mater. To his credit he continued holding out through his 30's. Finally, he came to the conclusion that he was not going to publish "Aleatoric Mood Poems in Onyx Light" in the foreseeable future, and yes, that's right, started making lemonade. With his English degree, succinct writing style (typical of many poets) and intransigent attitude, he was a natural for his lemonade of choice, journalism.

While I suspect that life is too complex to separate lemons from peaches in any meaningful way, I do hope to one day reach a definitive determination of where my copious lemonades end and my numerous peaches begin. . .or is that numerous lemons end and copious peaches begin.

OK,look. . .until I get this figured out, please use the "Serenity Prayer" with which this essay began. It's probably the best chance you have to negotiate the changes necessary to living a life.