To Prodigal Sons and Daughters

We still love you. We love you with your unlimited data plans, your $183 shirts, your Coach bags and matching shoes. We love you with your white table cloth dinners that you invite all your friends to and pay for them and tip not only your waiter, but the matrie d’, the bus boy, the coat check attedant, and the hansom cab driver. We love that you enjoyed a ride around the park. You bought everyone roses.

You’re so generous.

We loved the postcard from Paris; we aren’t sure how you enjoyed an opera in French since you took German in school, but we love that you tried. We love the perfume and the linens. We would have been happy with brie, but we understand that’s hard to ship. And the 1974 Bordeaux? We don’t blame you for drinking that on the plane ride home. The airline only has Sutter Home; we understand.

We love your San Francisco flat, made all the more charming because you rent it out on AirBnB when you’re out of town. You leave Ghirardelli chocolate on the pillows and sourdough bread on the counter next to your espresso machine. You have a basket of maps: wine country, Haight-Ashbury, Golden Gate Bridge. You allow small pets, but not children. Good call.

By Infrogmation of New Orleans (Photo by Infrogmation) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html),
CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0), CC BY 2.5
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5) or CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

We really love your choice of cars. You could have gone flashy, Ferrari or Porsche.  You had enough cash for a Bentley. Instead, you chose a VW Karmann Ghia, which looks like a lot of fun, but not expensive. Of course, if you’ve ever had a VW, you know how expensive they are, what with all the repairs and renting of cars while the other is in the shops. Insiders understand truly what an expense it is.

We love these things not because they are wonderful. They aren’t. It’s a cheese, a wine, a car, an apartment, a shirt, a bag to put shit in. We love them because we know they are nonsense. And we know, because we are old, that the more you spend on these things, the closer you will get to realizing how much nonsense they are.

We have the table set. The guests are on alert. The basement is full of Two Buck Chuck, Triscuits and Velveeta. We have a 93 Corolla that runs and a bed in the spare room. We still have your high school yearbooks and the VHS tape of you giving a speech at the local Rotary Club.

Spend away. Do what you need to do. We love you. And we won’t say a word.