Wednesday October 20, 2004 – Following the Current of Life

Wednesday October 20, 2004 – Following the Current of Life

You’ve lived a lifetime following whatever current was carrying you along. When you first slipped into the fast moving stream you hadn’t a clue as to where the current would take you, only that you were anxious to begin the journey. At 17 with few financial options as the 1960s were beginning, you saw a world unfolding around you that was filled with great adventure. Europe was a playground for wealthy Americans as was the Far East, especially Japan rebuilding full throttle just over 20 years after a devastating war. You wanted to see this world, to experience it the way you had read in books, the Europe of Earnest Hemingway, the far east of Joseph Conrad. It didn’t matter which, you just wanted to explore.

When the Navy recruiter offered to provide you four years of college in exchange for a tour of duty that would be over on your 21st birthday, what better bargain could you have struck: a little over three and a half years in exchange for enough tuition to attend most any public university in the country for four years. You weren’t ready for college anyway. You wanted to experience the world before you returned to the abstract world bound within the covers of books, the world of other people’s experience. That’s how the journey began. And all along the way there were divergent tributaries that would carry you in new directions.

The first of these was a test the Navy administered to all new recruits entering the service. Your score determined what direction your tour would take. Score badly and you were destined to scrub decks, work in mess halls, or any of a number of other shit assignments the Navy had to offer. Some score took you into the bowels of a ship as a fireman—the guys who tend the ships engine and drive systems. Another score had you pushing papers in the purser’s office. Your score had you repairing electronic equipment. You had no choice in the matter. The Navy ordered you to attend nearly two years of schools to teach you everything there was to learn about communications equipment and computers.

When you left the service, your resume listed experience repairing gear no one in the civilian world recognized or appreciated, except some recruiters for Bendix Corp. They happen to have the contract to maintain all the tracking stations around the world that would be communicating with the new Apollo Space Craft soon to be orbiting earth but thereafter to begin a journey to the moon. You arrived in Landover, Maryland to being work in Greenbelt—a 30-minute commute from Landover on the Beltway girdling Washington, DC before Apollo 1 killed astronauts Ed White II, Gus Grissom, and Roger Chaffee in a blazing launch pad accident on January 27, 1967. The job lasted a year after which you were anxious to get back to Texas where you could attend the University of Texas at a ridiculously low tuition rate, much lower than anything you could find in Maryland.

A job in Dallas seemed to emerge out of nowhere. Actually you pulled a discarded newspaper from a trash can in the office where you worked and there in the paper was a half page ad for Collins Radio Company. They wanted technical writers to work in Richardson, Texas—just north of Dallas. The interview went well and within two weeks you had an offer.

Collins Radio in Dallas and the University of Texas at Arlington took the better part of the next five years of your life. It was the best time of your life because during that time everything was possible. You still had seemingly unlimited options as you began your undergraduate studies. The great problem was deciding what you wanted to pursue. As you had always done, you let the current take you to a science degree in the exciting world of economics.

In hindsight, the degree was quite inspired for what you would end up doing. Ultimately economics is the motivating factor for all of mankind’s endeavors. It is the force that keeps us from taking up arms and killing one another, though, we manage to do quite a bit that as well. In the aftermath of Viet Nam, which your enlistment in the Navy completely exempted you from participating in, most large-scale conflicts became economic wars between great nations. Japan and Germany first emerging as great economic powers to challenge the dominant economic force of the U.S. The rest of Europe would follows as well as other nations in Asia but that would take time to play out.

When you left UT Arlington with that coveted degree the Navy had promised to pay for and you had earned, life suddenly got serious. You were no longer trying to decide what you were going to do with yourself, you now had to start doing it, whatever “it” was. Furthermore, you had amassed added responsibilities along the way, a wife and two young daughters. They had been waiting for you to begin the working life of a real head of household provider.

At the end of six years in Dallas, it became obvious that there wasn’t much opportunity waiting for you when you left the comfortable confines of the University. It was time to find a place where change was the constant, where there were plenty of fast moving streams to carry you to the next place in your life. Six months out of school and another answered newspaper ad recruiting technical writers for a new company in California found you packing family and belongings and making the journey west into the lush Santa Clara Valley at the southern end of San Francisco Bay.

You arrived in the early 70s just as the personal computer was about to be born. The stream you entered was a river racing to an uncertain future, white water rapids for as far as anyone could see. You had spent all your working life in large institutions, first the Navy, then Bendix, then Collins, and now you were with a start-up, who had just gotten purchased by Xerox, a company with far more money than good sense. You were now being carried along pell mell in a current that would eventually take you to where you are now, 30 years later, still looking for and finding currents to carry you always hopeful of finding one more before the stream runs dry.