Good For What?

 Don’t just be good.  Be good for something.  Henry David Thoreau said that.  I remember wanting to be good.  It was while I was bad.  I knew what it was to be bad.  I had lots of experience and events in my story of bad behavior.  I really did not know what it was to be good.  I thought it was just not being bad.  Stop doing bad things and voila! I would be good.  But I came across an old geezer, when I was not yet an old geezer, and though he did not strike me as a Thoreau reader, suggested I do something that was not part of my bad past.  Like what? Thinking he was going to suggest something above my pay scale, he suggested I stack the chairs.  And that was the beginning, for me, of becoming good for something.  I am almost at the end of another year of being good for something.  It keeps the bad in the past.