I’m a guy who likes a perfect moment. As I’ve said before, my whole sit-com condition makes this more difficult than it probably should be. If I’m alive and not on fire, that is a perfect moment, or it should be. But I have a sit-com condition. I want what my mind thinks is perfect. Which means very specific details.

I get a perfect moment every once in awhile. When I was eighteen, the summer before I went to college, I kissed a girl that I had dreamed of for years. A perfect moment. A dream grasped, finally. When I was pining for my high school years, I used to call them textbook golden moments, and they were. I’ll list a bunch, really quick like.

Talking with Ryan in his gold camaro outside of my house even though it was past curfew. Hanging out in our group. Walking to the river with Owen through the pine trees under the Rocky Mountains. Darlene teaching me how to smoke outside of Fuddruckers in her gray car with the bench front seat pulled up as far as it would go so my knees were under my chin. Things like that.

But it wasn’t just high school stuff. I remember being in the Himalayan mountains in Nepal, climbing up a grassy mountainside with our Sherpa and our porters crawling up the trail, and it was perfect. I was on an expedition in Nepal and it was hard and dramatic and perfect. And my wife and I spent a month housesitting at a mansion in the Rose Garden area of San Jose, California when we were first going out. Our own “Enchanted April”. There was one night, well, I’ll keep that to myself.

I got the edits back from my editor at Crescent Moon Press. I was working on them in the Houston airport during a layover and guess what? It was perfect. It was wonderful. It made every breath sweet.

Ideally, as I’ve said, every moment we’re not being tortured should be a perfect moment. But I live thinking I’ll never die and nothing will ever change, and so the seconds come cheaply, and I use them cheaply. Such is the tragedy of human life. This constant forgetting that life is precious.

But after twenty years of work, I’m drawing paychecks and getting paid off in perfect moments. It was worth it. Lord, was it worth it.