Great Expectations

If you lived your life through expectations, there is no doubt, things would never work out the way you expected it to. Life doesn't follow a path as if guided by the light of inner self determination and predestination, no matter what those late night ads on TV proclaim. Life truly is a road full of potholes, diversions and detours, some good, some wonderful and some very, very bad. It is how we deal with those roadblocks that truly define us.

But as misleading as expectations can be, our lives are inextricably tied to them. How many times have we uttered the phrase, "Well, that was not as bad as I expected.", or heard, "I expected more out of you." (I got that one a lot).  Reaching back to my school days of reading Dickens, we found that Pip was dealt repeated blows to his plans and ultimately realized that the life of a gentleman was really not that great of an expectation.  There is probably a lesson in that for all of us. I have reached out and failed a few times at various things, but as some of those aforementioned late night huskers claim; failing to reach out is failure in itself. Now please send me $24.95 in two easy payments and if you act now I'll send you a free set of steak knives.

As a child your life is seemingly a series of expectations, perhaps because there is nothing in the past to guide you along. Among them are the expectations that you will be loved and cared for, that all adults are tall, serious and old and the year is divided into two important dates; your birthday and Christmas.

Of course the reverse is also very true. As a parent, you don't know what to expect. You and your spouses' life will forever be divided between two periods; life before children and life after children.  Will it be "Married With Children" or "Ozzie and Harriett"? On second thought, "Ozzie and Harriett" is a pretty scary premise as well. "Cosby?" Oops, no. Not a good example either. But, you get my drift, whatever your life was as you knew it, it would be forever changed.

We all have expectations for ourselves and our children. As long as expectations do not devolve into disappointment, life can be, and probably is, a series of unmeet or unfulfilled expectations. There is always the sunny horizon of 'maybe' and what tomorrow might bring. Give me optimism over disappointment any time.

Of course, once you have passed through the firestorm of child rearing, the reality of becoming a grandparent smacks you in the face.  I always thought that the label of Grampa, Grandad or the ever exquisite Grandfather, would make me instantly older, greyer than the white hair I already have and somehow wiser beyond reason. My Dad, in his role as a grandparent, would always be able to string together words that would make even an infant sit back and think, 'Hmm. Now that is an interesting conceptualization of the human condition, especially from the perspective of an infant, such as I am, who cannot verbalize beyond screaming, crying and the odd gurgle or two.'

None of that happened to me, especially the wise part. My bon mots usually take the form of, "Buttons... make sound!"  But yet, it is one of the most unexpected of realities.  It really is true that being a grandparent is wonderful, yielding and bringing forth yet another life changing phase. Not only because you get to hold and gaze into the eyes of another iteration of your own genetic pool. You get see into the eyes of a new soul which reflects wonderment, trust and love.  But perhaps the most precious aspect of being a grandparent is that the child goes home with the parent at the end of the day. All the pleasures and none of the pitfalls. You can have a baby and still have sleep.

Expectations are not only present in family dynamics. They pop up in almost every facet of existence, from work to entertainment. Comedy itself,  creates a narrative that almost always ends with the unexpected. The telling of a joke sets the premise. The punch line, to be good,  has to be what was not expected. The holy trinity of comedy to me as a child were Abbott and Costello, Red Skeleton and Looney Tunes. I now know that basing your outlook on life on the comedic antics of a fat guy, a skinny guy, a clown and some animated anthropomorphic animals provides the basis for a pretty strange sense of humour, let alone what to expect out of life.

When I first heard the famous baseball sketch "Who's On First", it was a series of totally unexpected answers to simple everyday questions.  With every advancing step forward the circle of questioning fell back to the beginning. To this day, a half a century after first hearing it,  I cannot resist cracking a smile when I think about it.

Some of the most memorable movies provided that twist at the end to totally uproot our expectation of what would occur. Psycho, The Sixth Sense, Planet of the Apes and the Usual Suspects are some of the films that caught us all off guard, causing screams of 'whaaaaaat' to be bandied about movie theatres across the world. Upended expectations are the reason why these films still talked about today.

Like pulling a rabbit out of a top hat or a coin out of an ear, it is sometimes magical to watch the faces of people met by the unexpected. Surprise followed by befuddlement followed by wonderment.

Almost like life itself.