Preserving the American Way of LIfe

"When the war ended," O'Hare said to me, "I expected to be a lot more in fifteen years than a dispatcher of frozen-custard trucks."

"I guess we've all had disappointments," I said.

He didn't respond to this feeble try at brotherhood. His concern was for himself alone. "I was going to be a doctor, I was going to be a lawyer, a writer, an architect, an engineer, a newspaper reporter--" he said. "There wasn't anything I couldn't be," he said.

"And then I got married--" he said, "and the wife started having kids right away, and I opened a damn diaper service with a buddy, and the buddy ran off with the money, and the wife kept having kids. After the diaper service it was Venetian blinds, and after the Venetian-blind business went bust, it was frozen custard. And all the time the wife was having more kids, and the damn car breaking down, and bill-collectors coming around, and termites boiling out of the baseboards every spring and fall."

"Sorry," I said.

"And I asked myself," said O'Hare, "what does it mean? Where do I fit in? What's the point of any of it?"

Mother Night, Kurt Vonnegut