PREAMBLE

Preamble

At the very beginning, consider this:

“No one is an unjust villain in his own mind. Even - perhaps even especially - those who are the worst of us. Some of the cruelest tyrants in history were motivated by noble ideals, or made choices that they would call 'hard but necessary steps' for the good of their nation. We're all the hero of our own story.”

― Jim Butcher, Turn Coat

I’ve had three heart attacks and one intervention to prevent another.  I’ve been told I have hereditary cardio-vascular disease and can expect more of the same as I “age”. By any reasonable standard, I can’t expect an extensive amount of time ahead of me. Naturally, I find myself doing a personal accounting of where I’ve been and what I’ve done over the last 72 or so years and wondered if there is any theme or, for that matter, any purpose, to those 72 years.

Taking stock of my life, I am reminded about a “Father’s Day” a couple of dozen years ago where my wife told me she was worried that I wouldn’t like the gift that she and our only child, my son, had picked out for me because they didn’t “ really know much about me.”  I was actually surprised about that but had no idea how I would get them to “know” me better.  I never thought I had made any particular effort to hide anything about myself to either of them, although I’ll admit to a certain amount of “role-playing” in the enterprise of fatherhood and fully in the interest of perceived good parenting.  Apparently though, I never did anything to correct that impression because recently I was confronted with that again.

As I have been forced into this exile of retirement and decided to write about my life experiences, I have, in the process, verbally related to my wife (of some forty-four-plus years) of the vignettes I have written about my early life before I met her and, some, even afterwards.  To my surprise, she told me that she had never heard these stories and expressed surprise, and in some cases dismay, at the content of the stories.  Facing the proposition that if the woman with whom I have spent almost every day of my life for over forty-four years didn’t know these things about me, I suspected my son knows far, far less

I want both of them to know these stories.  I want both of them to know me beyond the context of “Dad” or “Husband”.  However, I think there will be neither time nor opportunity to sit with them and tell the stories.  There will have to be a more permanent medium.

Logically, the best solution is to reduce these stories into a less volatile form so they can be weighed, measured and refined at a later date.  In that manner, I will leave a paper trail at least for my wife and son to use for reference in the future, or for my own use, and risking the possibility that someday, someone else will find this and have access to my experiences, innermost thoughts, hopes and fears.  My only solace will be that with any luck it will be long after I have gone.

Obviously the preceding treatise points in the direction of “an old man, trying to find meaning to his life”.  I admit that I am intrigued by the questions of what is the meaning of life in general and why is the span of any human life so ridiculously short in relation to, say, the age of the universe, the size of the galaxy, and, of course, there is the question of what happens after death. I don’t pretend to have any special insight into those questions and I certainly don’t have any “inside track” to what lies beyond life.  I am therefore content to fall back on what I read a long, long time ago.

Prologue to Dante’s Inferno:

If I thought my answer was

To someone who might return to the world,

This flame would move no more;

But since from this depth it never happened

That anyone alive returned (if I hear right),

Without fear of infamy I’ll answer you

In other words, since nobody really knows what “lies beyond”, any discussion of it is useless.  The only thing that counts then is what we did while we were alive and what we left behind for others.  That is the purpose which I will pursue.

I’ve entitled this rather pathetic effort   “That Didn’t Go As I Planned” because, as you will see, for a large part of my life I thought my fate was pre-ordained and tried, sometimes successfully and sometimes not so successfully to alter the course.  In some strange ways it was, given the times and circumstances there were choices that were not mine to make and I endured those even if I resented them.   The value, morality or intelligence of what choices I made that were mine to make, I will leave to whatever the reader may interpret them to be.