do we know when enough is enough???

one of the great memories from my childhood was going to work with my father...i loved getting up early, putting on my 'work' clothes and going through the adult motions; grabbing coffee to go (a novelty in the 70's) rushing for the train, folding the paper along the crease to make it as compact a reading experience as possible and listening to great conversations...oh before i go on you want to know what my father did/does, right...yes of course you do...this was a question never asked when i was a kid...and if anyone did inquire just 'cause they did i usually told them that he sold dream and illusions...which i guess is not much different from the guys who sold mortgages to everyone who wanted to be part of the great american dream in the early part of this century....yes of course i grew up in suburbia and my dad was a math wiz, so you guessed it, he is a wall street guy...back when men wore 3 piece suits, had outlandish lunches and played cards in the smoking car on the way home, a time when no one asked 'what does your father do?"...in fact i did not even know what some of my friend's fathers did until long into my 20's when i moved back to the same suburban town from whence i came...at which point i started to meet people who went to college with my childhood friends and acquaintances and would say 'oh you must know sallyjoedavid and their father who started-owed-tookpublic thegreatestcompanyever!!! wow...well now i know and good for sallyjoedavid and their family!

the other thing i knew was that 'back then' there was a sense of enough...as in you, me, us, we have enough...
and if you had enough or were lucky to have more than enough you had the good graces not to let everybody know how much enough is...one lesson i learned on the way home from work with my dad one day was told to me by his partner...a man of the same age who loved cars...and who had enough...this lesson was shared with me on a day we drove to work...after work when we walked to our spot in the garage on a side street west of broadway behind Trinity church i noticed a really nice car and commented to that affect...our friend said, 'let me tell you what you can learn about a person from their car'....the person who has nothing drives a jalopy and happy for the simple mode of transportation enabling him to get to and from....the person who has cash to burn but has not saved drives a cadillac (remember this is the last 70's) or a mercedes...the person who is comfortable in their own skin or has a trust fund drives a BMW 2002...no one will look twice and its great car...the man who told me this story still drives his subaru wagon and flies coach between his homes in the north east and california....his point was well taken...it has less to do with how nice your car is, how big your house, how fancy your vacation and more to do with how much is enough and when enough is really enough are you aware how blessed you are and realize it is time to give back...we all have our own idea of what is enough...no one can set that thresh hold for us...as good citizens however it is up to us to interpret how much enough is.

so often we let life get the better of us..we need and have to have...we want people to know us for our set pieces; our cars,  our parties, our vacations or our homes...what we do for a living...rather than what we do with what we do for a living...when we have enough we need to give back, share the happiness...give ourselves a hardy 'congratulations' and realize our enough.