To Reinvent the Wheel

"Why reinvent the wheel?" my father asked me as we sat down to breakfast. "Why not work smart? Not just hard. Smart."

"If you reinvent the wheel", I agreed, "you save time. You can just hop into the car, rev up the engine, and away you go".

"You’ll need to check if the brakes work, too", my mother cautioned from the kitchen as she threw away the emptied milk carton. "If it’s a strange car, you don’t know if everything works well".

"And even if they work, you’re not used to them". I swallowed a piece of sand-toned toast and with it my submissiveness. One man’s limits are another man’s beginnings.

"That is okay", he said. "That is risk. And that is why you must follow in my footsteps", he was saying. "I’ve created all I’ve created for you. Don’t be ungrateful. Don’t be selfish. Don’t go chasing dreams".

"But chasing dreams—that is the risk, father. And that is the glory. And that is the creativity. That is the blood, the scrape and the bruise and the battering of body and soul as you fight your way to the top—alone—as you forge your way through the jungle—alone—as you count step by step through the desert—alone". I pushed aside my unfinished toast and cleared my throat, ready to attack.

I looked at him sipping his black coffee in the small white cup with the loumidis parrot hand-painted, savoring it with his eyes closed and his furrowed brow for once smooth. The highlights in his hair, pale as elephant ivory, slowly blinded me to tears. The creases chiseled around his eyes and mouth burned similar patterns in my heart as if a panther was sitting across from me, tail swishing and great black eyes unblinking, and raised a claw to mirror with marks on my heart the marks of his face.

It stung, but I didn’t know if and how the pain continued either way. His dreams, or mine? My father, or my future?