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Let your truth light up the night
Shine, sink, and smite when necessary
And whatever collateral damage arises
Dries with the morning sun
Eventually enveloped by the collieshangie of life’s constant thrum
Do not waver
Persist
Thrive
Arrive
Live
Light Up the Night ~ Copyright 2024 by Kenneth Painter aka bionicgeezer
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I can never read this without crying 😢.
Ever. ~ bg
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The Road Not Taken
During the course of a long life we all come to forks in the road, course changes and corrections that affect the direction of our lives for the better or worse depending on the outcome, of course, when we later look back on them. We might wish we had otherwise turned left or perhaps right or maybe even stopped altogether and stayed in one place even a little longer. Reflections, memories, and doubts, oh my! A cocktail for melancholia if indulged in overmuch.
While my life has experienced many winding curves and some major life changes throughout, the actual seminal moment I can point to occurred when I was 20, during the months of November and December of 1971. I can recall it like it was yesterday. Gasoline was 32 cents a gallon. First Class postage had risen at that point to 6 cents per stamp, and you could get a complete roast beef dinner at the Woolworth’s Diner counter for $1.10 and that included all the fixin’s. I don’t know, maybe that’s why Woolworth’s finally went out of business after so damn long. Time passes. Things die. Progress. But there was a war going on . . . You may have heard of it, Viet Nam.
The war had been going on for a decade or perhaps even more if truth be told, but the US involvement kept growing and in the late 60s and early 70s the draft was in place. While I was in community college, I’d been protected with a college deferment, however, at the end of my sophomore year I was out of money, and I wasn’t sure of the exact step I wanted to take next. The term Bonus Year hadn’t yet come into vogue, but that’s exactly what I was needing except there was one gigantic major roadblock. Looking back can be a bitch, can’t it? Call this a Bitch Hitch.
Please allow me to explain the draft lottery. Without getting into the procedure of how and when it was incepted and carried out, each of us eligible US male citizens who were at least 18 years old were assigned a lottery number according to our birthdates, and we were eligible to be drafted according to how LOW that number was, i.e. the number 1 would be drafted first, 2 second, etc. The rounds would keep going on up throughout each year as the need for troops throughout the world were fulfilled. Well, in 1971 there was still Korea and Germany, of course, maybe even Japan still, and certainly a few places in the Middle East at that time and throughout the world, but the largest portion went to Southeast Asia and the war effort in Viet Nam. Number 180 was the approximate lottery number which was expected to be reached by the end of December. Not bad. Half were going to get nailed, and half would be free.
When I finally finished college in June 1971 with an A.A. Degree in Liberal Arts as a Political Science major, I’d seen my once sterling GPA from high school which had been 3.84 fall off to a 2.95 here because of two reasons, work and play. Part of me wants to say sex and drugs, but it was neither of those, and there’s been precious little of the former and never any of the latter other than prescriptions. Even though I’d been living at home (with the exception of a glorious 6 month hiatus) working my way through college had been cutting into my study time, and the play part, well, I had found my love, and it was almost dominating me.
My father and I weren’t particularly close. We didn’t hate each other or anything like that, no there was a healthy respect. We were just two almost totally different people. As I’ve gotten older, I realize my likenesses to him, but these have more to do with genetics than personal tastes, beliefs, and just, well … for some reason, my brain is wired different than the rest of my family. That said, the one thing my dad did for me for which I’ll forever be beholden is giving me a 6-string guitar for my Christmas present during my freshman year in college when I was 18. I’d been singing in the children’s choir at church from age 9-14 then stopped, but I still sang to the radio constantly. I’d taken steel laptop guitar lessons years earlier when I was about 10 and 11 but gave them up even though I was very good. They were teaching me by numbers, not by regular musical notation. Yet my dad recognized my desire to sing and fulfilled it.
So my GPA had fallen off between the work and my constant guitar playing and writing song lyrics, most of which really weren’t all that good, but now and again I’d hit on an idea that wasn’t half bad. Still I’d compromised my time by my passion. And I had a 3-octave vocal range. Why wasn’t I in a band somewhere? I’ll never know! But I’d come to the crossroads. And my head was spinning. And it was driving me crazy!
I’d planned on being a lawyer. That had been my dream since childhood. Once I’d finally realized the price tag of getting through college without scholarships for all the years it would take, and once I had a good talk with myself, I realized that I realized that I wasn’t so much in love with the idea of being a lawyer as I was with the law, the history, the teaching, the politics, how geography influences it, age, income, and all the other factors that go into making us us.In short, Maybe, I’d be better off doing something else. Historian, teaching, maybe even acting, since I’d even dabbled into a little of that in Shakespeare class during my Sophomore year, and that turned out actually decent. Or should I go off and write songs somewhere? But I had choices! EXCEPT . . . Detour – college traffic delay, follow orange cones through Viet Nam. Danger Will Robinson!
During my sophomore year of college I worked as a night and weekend janitor at the largest Presbyterian church in my hometown. A major responsibility had been placed upon me there, and evidently I’d handled it well. Nevertheless, It didn’t pay well, and so late in the spring before I graduated, knowing my situation, my well-meaning and kind boss, Carl, as only the grandfatherly kind can do, took me aside, and he gave advice. Carl told me that afternoon That if I wasn’t going back to school in the fall, I needed to work at something that was going to pay, and perhaps that it would be a good idea to work at the auto parts manufacturer where my dad did since they were hiring. While I could. Because my deferment would run out in December. After all, my draft lottery number was 29!
You see, Carl knew this. So did everybody else. My dad. My mom. My friends. I don’t know how many other people paid attention. I’m sure more than a few were worrying, however it was still early yet. Carl didn’t want me to be stuck in a $1.75 an hour part-time job when I could be working a $3.25 an hour, 40-hour week job for a few months. Make hay while the sun shines, so to speak. Carl was kind about it, and I began working at the auto parts plant on the 2nd shift 2 weeks later; the curve in my road had begun though where it would lead, I couldn’t begin to imagine.
I worked my way through diecast machines making aluminum parts for autos and small engines such as lawn mowers and roto-tillers eventually landing as an inspector of these pieces. And that’s how the month of November found me when I received the now notorious letter from my local draft board. Dear so-and-so, You are required to report to Fort Wayne in Detroit on December …. 1971 at …..
A Greyhound bus will be dispatched to pick you up at 5:30 a.m. on …… at the Burger Chef on …….
Be there. Etc. Etc…..
And I can still see the registered letter there shaking in my hands, shaking, and I realize now how thoroughly up my ass my head was. I knew I was confused. I knew I didn’t have a plan in place. I knew I didn’t really know where to turn at that moment, but I did know I still had five weeks to figure it out. And the Army at least had given us the decency of a few weeks to put our lives in order. Looking back on it, if I’d had any sense, as much as I love the water and I’m not claustrophobic, I might have joined the Navy. I’d have gotten the rest of my college paid for on the GI Bill, and I probably would have come out of the closet a lot sooner, but again, another road not taken, and no regrets here.
I told my boss at work, Gerry, of what was going down and made plans to leave my job in December. He was sorry to see me go, but we always knew this was a possibility. In the meantime, I considered then my other only semi-real possibility.
I lived 75 miles from Canada. I’d visited there only a couple of times, though I’d been looking over the river at it every time I went to Detroit or up across the Straits of Mackinac to Sault Saint Marie. Michiganders, especially those with relatives in Detroit, and who perchance to wander around the Huron side of the state get really acquainted with Canada. We even used to learn some French in elementary school back in the day. Those were the days! That said, with all of this kicking around in me, I spent the better part of a day weighing the pros and cons of slipping into Canada as some young men around me were doing. Trying to find out about it. Why I finally didn’t were two men. My dad and Pop Blessing. Both were World War II vets. My dad had been an airplane mechanic stationed in Jamshedpur, India and worked on the B-29’s which flew missions over the Himalaya’s to bomb Japan from the rear. Pop Blessing on the other hand stormed the beaches of Normandy, France on D-Day, June, 6, 1944. I just felt that should I leave America for Canada under these circumstances, even though I disagreed with the war in Viet Nam, it was just like turning my back on their service, and I could not and would not do that. EVER. With the phrase . . . “there might be hope for you yet” . . . ringing in my ears, I put the idea out of my head. I silently screamed. If there were a forest behind me, I would have!
That fated Tuesday in December 1971 when the Greyhound bus was due to pick me up to whisk me off to Detroit for my Army physical after which I would be inducted into the Army and 13 weeks of basic training at Fort Knox Kentucky was preempted on Monday. A Screeching Halt the day before! We didn’t have Harry Potter in those days, but if we did, it would have been like if an owl flew into my house and dropped this registered Howler into my lap.!
Please, DO NOT COME TO THE EXAMINING STATION AT FORT WAYNE IN DETROIT ON ……. There has been a small fire at the examining station, and it will take several weeks to be cleaned up. We will contact you sometime later in January 1972 about rescheduling etc and so forth ….. (SEE MY JAW-DROPPING AMAZEMENT HERE!)
I swear to God, and God knows this is true, I had in no way anything to do with that fire! And if they didn’t get me by the end of December, my number would go back to the end of the line, meaning those who were born the year after me in numbers 1 through 365 would have to be drafted first and then back to my year up to 29 again. Since they’d only usually been getting up to about 180 roughly per birth, the feeling was, they had about 2 ½ more weeks to nab me. I held my breath for those weeks.
I didn’t hear from my draft board again until I was 24 and newly married. Another road, another story.
Through the years I’ve told parts of this story, mostly this last part, because it so astounding that God or fate, kismet, chance or luck of the draw whatever you care to deem it can drop in your lap at any given moment. But I ended up taking the rest of the week off. Playing my guitar, writing some poems, tunes, crying when no one was around of course, I wouldn’t let anyone know about that! But Geez Louise! I’d just hit the lottery, me and whoever else missed out on not getting a finger up their ass that day!
And I went back to work at the shop the next Monday, I and continued there until I began my junior year back at the university in September 1972 this time having taken a wise course correction after receiving this pardon out of the Wild Blue Yonder. What was I gonna be? Who was I gonna be? As the calendar turned 1972 I wasn’t yet exactly sure, but whatever was gonna happen, I knew, “There might be hope for you yet.”
Next Up On bionicgeezerbares . . . “The Other 10%”
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“Do not squander time, for that is the stuff life is made of.” ~ Ben Franklin
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