Rarely do I watch movies anymore because I've been disappointed more times than not with their endings. I see the credits scroll up and I say, "What? Did they run out of film?" The story ended as if the director couldn't figure out how to bring the plot to a conclusion, so he just stopped in the middle of nothing.

The other endings I dislike are reality checks. You watch a guy go through hardship after hardship until he begins to find his way. You root for the poor soul. You want to see him happy when the cameras stop rolling, but - oh no, he ends up where he started, or worse yet, he is left alone inside a bigger hole than the one he fell into in the opening scene.As a writer a novel, of plays, of columns and of feature stories, I do not like to leave my readers believing that life stinks and then you die. A literary critic once told me, "You're too mushy with your characters and your endings are too much like fairy tales. Readers want writers to strip the flesh from their characters right to the bare bone. They want to commiserate with the loser in life who can't get out of his own way. They need to believe that as bad as their lives are, people have it worse than they do."Go tell that to the millions of women who know a happy ending is coming before they read one page of a grocery store romance novel with a half-naked woman and a herculean man on the cover. A reader's fantasy perhaps, but a momentary escape from life's reality for sure. What's wrong if everyone lives happily ever after even if it's only fiction?Speaking of happy, people have told me I don't act like a guy with a warm and fuzzy personality. I don't smile or laugh as much as I should and I suppose I sometimes look like I'm carrying the weight of the world upon my shoulders. The perception of me, however, is not the actual me. I put myself in a very small group of men who are hard on the outside, but soft on the inside. We love smash mouth football, slug it out boxing fights, hockey brawls, and tough guy type movies, but when we temper our testosterone fires, we wear softer faces and we're not afraid to show them.We believe in love. We prepare candlelight dinners accompanied by soft piano music. For us, Valentine's Day can be any Tuesday night with no advance notice or specified date marked on the calendar.Compassion flows throughout our veins. We feel for the weak, the suffering and for the unfortunate. We are men with strong wills, but we will still cry real tears when our hearts are hurting.Whether you like it or not, what you see is what you get with us. This country is filled with too many men who wear phony faces in public and never show you who they really are when they are behind closed doors. That's not us. If we're happy, you'll see it. If we're sad, you'll know it. We're not bragging. We're just honest about who we are.Years ago I came upon a poem titled "The Invitation" written by Oriah Mountain Dreamer, a Native American elder. The spirit of its words has stayed with me because it defines the character of a beautiful person. I'd like to offer some of this poem to you.It doesn't matter to me what you do for a living.I want to know what you ache for, and if you dare of meeting your heart's longing.It doesn't interest me with how old you are.I want to know if you would risk looking like a fool for love, for your dreams, for the adventures of being alive …I want to know if you can sit with pain - mine and your own without moving to hide it, or fade it, or fix it.I want to know if you can be with joy, mine and your own, if you can dance with wildness and ecstasy without cautioning us to be careful …I want to know if you can see Beauty even when it is not pretty every day. And if you can source your own life from its presence.I want to know if you can live with failure, yours and mine, and still stand on the edge of the lake and shout out to the silver of the full moon, "YES!" …It doesn't interest me to know where you live or how much money you have. I want to know if you can get up after a night of grief and despair, weary and bruised to the bone and do what needs to be done to feed the children,I want to know if you can be alone with yourself, and if you truly like the company you keep in the empty moments.The spirit of this poem challenges us all to make the best of who we are. If we remember to be real with ourselves and to forget the limitations of being human, perhaps we will have a happy ending after all.Rich Strack can be reached at

katehep11@gmail.com.