Living Life to the Fullest

We just had lunch with a publisher-client of ours at the local P. F. Chang’s, a sort of high-end Chinese restaurant. We follow the same ritual every year with this client: one morning in late February we meet at their office at 11:00 to discuss production work for five of their college schoolbook catalogs. The meeting inevitably wraps up early. We sit around and chew the fat for a while, then proceed to a restaurant within walking distance where our client treats us to lunch. How do you like that? A guaranteed free lunch every year! They are far and away one of the best clients we’ve ever had. God bless ’em.

So there we were in the restaurant chatting away. I had the presence of mind not to stick chopsticks up my nose just in case that tried and true gag might not work with this crowd (I’ve noticed some people don’t find it funny). I also didn’t ask for the standard Szechwan-style Alley Cat Platter that I once tricked an intern into ordering for me over the phone (true!). I was quite the gentleman really. Mommy would have been proud.

Our main contact for the publisher, Mr. Snrub, who sat to my right, could pass as a Renaissance painter’s model for Dionysus, the god of wine and partying-down. He is quite corpulent and fleshy, rosy-cheeked with tightly-curled hair. He always has a slight smile on his lips and a witticism at the ready. Throw a toga on him, clap a laurel wreath around his head, thrust a goblet of wine into one hand and a bunch of grapes in the other, and there you are.

We were all talking about our kids. He has an 18-year-old daughter and a 16-year-old son. The daughter is going to UMass Lowell, and I mentioned that one of mine is going to UMass Boston; both are freshmen as it turns out. My daughter is undeclared, while his is already going for a degree in adolescent psychology; this past semester she earned all A’s except for an A-minus in English (which she vowed to dispute). She plans to spend four years there, get her degree, and then go on to divinity school where she hopes to get ordained as an Episcopal priest. Mr. Snrub wound all this up by saying very casually, “She only has 10 years left to live, so she really has to go for it.”

Honest to God, I thought he said that as a joke, so I chuckled a little. I thought he meant she acts as if she only has 10 years left to live, sort of a comment on the the young and ambitious. The flow of the conversation soon took another tack and I presently found a moment to replay in my mind what he said. Finally I asked him, “I don’t know if I misheard you, but did you mean it when you said your daughter has only 10 years left to live?” He told me yes; she has muscular dystrophy. The only reply I had to that was, “Wow! What a fighter!”

Ay dios mio! Look, hopefully I’ll never know what it’s like to have my life cut short, but I have to admit I have no idea how I would react to that kind of knowledge. The smart money would bet on me being a pitiful, sniffling, whiny crybaby. If you had 10 years left — and you knew it — what would you do? Would you work your ass off like Mr. Snrub’s daughter? Put every ounce of effort into a goal that 10 years from now you won’t be around to see? I’m guessing it must be a kind of legacy she has in mind — you know, make your mark on the world in grand style before time runs out.

That, folks, impresses the hell out of me.