I am not a fan of science fiction stories except for a few that have caught my eye. One written by Ray Bradbury called “All Summer in a Day” did make an impact. After a settlement had been established on the planet of Venus and families took residence, they established a school to educate their offspring. The story centers on a class of nine-year-olds who have gotten used to constant rainstorms. In fact, it rains so much that the sun can be seen only for an hour every seven years.
The classmate named Margot remembers the sun because she was a recent arrival from earth where she had taken the sun for granted. As the children talked, Margot described the sun to them, but they didn’t believe her stories. She endured a good deal of razzing and teasing for her account of pleasantries she had experienced in the sun. It resulted in their ganging up on her and locking her in a closet.
The rare occurrence of sunshine on Venus approached and the teacher took the class outdoors to enjoy it. Poor Margot was forgotten in the closet as they ran outside the school to revel and bask in the sunshine. The hour went by all too quickly and when the sun started receding behind heavy clouds, rain started falling again. Returning indoors to their regular studies, they shame-faced remembered her behind that locked door and freed her. They began realizing what they had done to their classmate who would have to wait another seven years to feel the sunshine on her skin.
One memory came to me from the days when I still believed in Santa Claus and missed seeing him arrive at our house. My mother shouted at me from their bedroom that Santa Claus had just come. As you may suspect I ran in there as fast as I could. There was a package setting there all wrapped up nice with a big ribbon and bow. My question was when? Mom answered, “Just now, he dropped it off and left for his next stop.” I rushed to the window and looked and looked hoping to get a glimpse of him and his sleigh. The gift was nice, but, oh how I wished I could have seen him with my own eyes. This was a missed opportunity.
When I had started working for a regular paycheck I got the big idea that I should buy some farm land. Some was available, and I drove over to look and talk with the owner. Maybe I wasn’t serious enough about it because I dropped the idea. It was the time when the soil bank program still accepted acreage to take land out of production and owners would be paid for doing so. When I started realizing people were doing this and using the annual income to make payments on their mortgages, I knew I had missed my opportunity to become a landholder.
Most people can remember instances of missed opportunities for advancement or betterment. It seems as if it’s our natural lot in life. We started this article with the idea of science fiction. One other example of that genre comes to mind relating to a missed opportunity. It was the one-time television show on Twilight Zone called “Time Enough at Last.” A nuclear holocaust destroyed the civilized world to the point where only one person survived. A studious sort of man, a bookworm with very thick eyeglasses, emerged from the wreckage and wondered what he could do. He reached the psychological point of holding a pistol to his head to commit suicide. As he scanned the landscape he spotted the ruins of a library. His spirits lifted when he started sorting through the books lying in disarray and realizing he finally had time enough to read all the good literature available.
In his excitement he dropped one book and as he bent to pick it up his glasses fell to the ground and shattered. He lost his opportunity. I brought this up on a recent visit to my optometrist to make light conversation. Here was his take on it. “It was unbelievable. He could have found glasses somewhere in the rubble that would have let him see well enough to read.”
Maybe it can be called greed but I missed an investment opportunity. During Jimmy Carter’s presidency inflation started raging and costs rose steeply. On the other hand if you had some money it could be invested in CDs at ever-increasing rates of interest. We scratched some dollars together to buy what for us was a sizable CD. We thought the rising rate had peaked. Nope. It went higher. So it goes.
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