Michigan's Missing Glove

Wow

“Goodbye, love. I’m going on a three-year expedition into the wilds of knowledge. I don’t know if I’ll make it out alive or when, but you will always be in my heart,” he said.

She didn’t know quite what to think. This situation wasn’t supposed to come up unless the draft was reinstated, but it had. In a plot twist kind of way, the way that works really well if it’s fiction and makes your stomach knot up if it’s real. She sat there, twisting the bedspread into little balls and trying not to say what she really thought: This was ridiculous.

How can you say that? If that’s what it takes. Idealism kills everyday and no one idealistic notices. It makes the realists gag and the pessimists cry, but those damn dreamers just keep dreaming. And killing without noticing any difference. And the thing she didn’t say was the thing anyone who’s read a novel about the Civil War or Vietnam or panning for gold in Alaska knows. If you go on that expedition, you’ll come back and I’ll have vanished. But idealists don’t read books about war or prospecting. They feel certain that they’ll be five-star generals who shout Eureka into the echoing mouths of gold caves. And they never wonder why it hasn’t happened yet. They just keep standing there, bludgeoning reality to death with an invisible, nonexistent silver spoon that they swear is there while the rest of us write morality plays all about them and the conquests that might have been.