salary men, in tears, on boat

At the end of a long work day, two salary men sit down next to me on the commuter boat and ask me what I've been up to lately. I tell them both about the patron saint of bachelors everywhere, Patrick Kildow.

The more they hear about the glorious life of Kildow, the more they cry. While Patrick is back country skiing, they're making lunches for the kids, making the nut the pay the mortgage, making the plan to do what they damn well please. In ten or twenty years.

One salary man became wistful. When he was a young lad, he graduated from college and briefly considered working in the Cape for the summer, Florida for the winter, and Colorado for the spring skiing.

He asked one such gentlemen how long he'd been pursuing such a career, and the man replied, "fifteen years."

The free spirit turned corporate lawyer who's packed on a few stones worth of pounds since the glory days looked glumly out the window, thinking of things that might have been.

Glorious Kildow thinks of a great many things that might have been, but being a salary man is not one of them.

In the words of the bard, "work is so overrated."