The Blue Room Cafe

What You Should Know About Me

You’ve never been to the Smithsonian in Washington D.C., have you Amelie?

One day you should take a trip there. Expect to encounter heavy security at the door, so don’t bring a large purse with you. (When I went, a guard demanded that I take a sip of the bottled water I was carrying, in-case I had filled it with some dangerous chemical.)

Now that I think about it, I don’t think I’ve ever seen you carry a purse.

Anyways, not too far away from Jackie Kennedy’s dresses are Dorothy’s ruby red shoes from The Wizard of OZ. They're the ones she pilfered off of a witch that was crushed under a house. The shoes are kept in a glass case so you can stand back and admire them from a distance. This kind of existence is unnatural for a pair of shoes. They may be easy to desire from the other side of a glass, but shoes come alive when they are on someone’s feet. They completely fulfill their purpose.

A pair of shoes trapped in a temperature controlled glass vault will never live a full life. Normal shoes go on trips to the grocery store and step in the occasional pile of doggie surprise left on the sidewalk. And when they have holes in the soles and worn off heels, they have no other place to go but in the trash. But the shoes in the trash are much happier than the ones that spend a lifetime in a guarded museum. You know why?

Because they have no regrets. Those shoes never wonder what life could have been.

Before we met, I lived in an upscale neighborhood in Lake Mary. It’s only thirty minutes away if you take Interstate 4. That information may have been more helpful if you actually owned a car.

Well, Lake Mary is part business centers and stores and part neighborhood. There are some average to below average income areas, but Lake Mary is known for its beautiful upper middle class and above neighborhoods.

I lived in a pristine housing development located on a golf course with a guarded gate at the entrance. Once the guard raises the gate to let you in, you immediately see that you’ve entered a world that is not well connected to reality. Everywhere you look, there's perfect grass that's a luminous green all year around. In the winter when everyone’s lawn on the outside is brown and frostbitten, guess what? It’s still green in my neighborhood (It doesn’t matter that this is a town in Florida. The frost still comes and winter still kills stuff.) The sidewalks are always spotless, and the fire hydrants have a fresh coat of paint all the time.

If I had never left such a wonderful place, I wouldn't have learned what could be.

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