Do I Want It? Yes. But Do I Need It?
Maria and I were driving home last week after my quarterly checkup for colorectal cancer recurrence, and I wanted a hot fudge sundae.
I knew an ice cream shop on our route home had exactly what I wanted. They serve it in a tall plastic go-cup, and the hot fudge ripples down the inside from top to bottom as it melts the ice cream. With whipped cream and a cherry on top for good measure. Yes!
The last time I had one was more than four years ago, before advanced colorectal cancer tried to kill me. Last week, I could almost taste that tempting treat to celebrate my eighty-third birthday and the check-up results that showed no cancer recurrence.
But the closer we got to the ice cream shop, the more I remembered a family saying from my childhood living in poverty on a family farm in the Missouri Ozarks.
My wants are many, but my needs are few.
That’s what my parents would tell my younger sister and me when we wanted something beyond our ability to pay for it. I don’t remember having a hot-fudge sundae back then.
Truthfully, I didn’t need one last week, although my taste buds were salivating and money was in my pocket. My tummy was full enough from the three shrimp tacos at lunch, so I didn’t ask Maria to stop at the ice cream shop. At home, I settled for a half-cup of vanilla ice cream from our freezer that evening.
Throughout my life, many times I wanted several things I didn’t need, even if I had the money.
One prime example is the several years when I wanted to own a Porsche 928. Not the rear-engine six-cylinder 911 model that my first wife always said looked like a frog. The 928 beauty I wanted was a sleek design with an upfront V-8.
In 1983, I had a bonus check after two years of working for a communications company in New York City, and I knew exactly where the Porsche dealer was in our Maryland suburbs. One weekend, I parked my 1977 Volkswagen Beetle down the street out of sight and walked into the showroom.
The car of my dreams was sitting on the showroom floor. It was beautiful. Black, and it had an electric sunroof.
The smiling salesman welcomed me, and I pointed to the car. He opened the driver’s door for me, and I bent down to sit on the leather seat.
But I bumped my head on the door frame.
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Determined, I squeezed my six-foot, 220-pound body into the seat. But the interior roof was so low I had to bend my head to one side. Sensing an easy sale was going south, the salesman pushed buttons on the electric seat to accommodate me. No luck.
“Maybe if you open the sunroof,” he suggested.
What? Did he expect me to drive my dream car only on warm sunny days, with the sunroof open to make room for my head? I laughed so much it hurt.
Yes, I wanted it. But it didn’t work for me, and I didn’t need it. So I left the showroom and walked back to my VW Beetle. It had ample headroom and also had a sunroof. The seats were vinyl, but it was all I really needed to get to and from our neighborhood subway station on rainy days. (My three young sons always enjoyed opening the sunroof and riding with me on sunny weekends, but I let it go in the mid 1990s.)
Over the years, I wanted some other things I didn’t need, and I bought a few of them anyway. A small vacation cottage on Ocracoke Island in North Carolina. A 37-foot Chris-Craft Constellation motoryacht on the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland.
Both my cottage and my boat chewed through a lot of my money, and I let them go to people who wanted them more than I needed them. All I really needed was to rent a motel room on the island for a semi-annual week-long getaway, and maybe hitch a ride on a friend’s motoryacht on the Bay once in a while.
After I retired and divorced, I wanted to live on the Baja Peninsula far from my ex-wife in Maryland, but close enough to San Diego for non-stop flights to visit my three sons back East.
During two weeks of searching, I found a place in an oceanfront golf resort. It was an unfinished three-bedroom townhouse high on a hill with a sweeping view of the Pacific Ocean. My two youngest sons went with me to see it, and we played golf on holes adjacent to the crashing surf.
I wanted it, and I emptied my 401(k) to buy it for all cash. But the builder defrauded me, leaving me with an unfinished shell townhouse that I didn’t want or need. A Mexican court awarded damages to me after five years, but the builder fled the country and was out of the court’s jurisdiction. It took many more years to find somebody who wanted the place and was willing to finish construction.
In hindsight, all I really needed was a one-bedroom rental place.
January of 2027 will be my next quarterly checkup for cancer recurrence, and the fourth anniversary of being declared cancer-free. Hopefully, the tests will show no recurrence of my colorectal cancer and no spread to lymph glands and nearby organs.
The fourth anniversary will be a significant milestone for me before my fifth anniversary in January 2028. That’s because a scientific study by the National Library of Medicine in the USA states that the five-year recurrence rate for rectal cancer is 89 percent. I’m hoping to beat that statistic so I can avoid more debilitating chemotherapy and radiation and potential surgery.
If the results from my quarterly checkup in January 2027 indicate no recurrence, I’m going to ask Maria to stop at that ice cream shop on the way home.
My wants may be many, and my needs may be few. But I know I’ll want that hot fudge sundae to celebrate, and I will need it.
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An earlier version of this appeared in my Substack newsletter at https://mikelkmiller.substack.com/p/do-i-want-it-yes-do-i-need-it-not
