Category: A Boy’s Life

Side Hustles and Morality in the 80s

On By Chris SoutherIn A Boy's Life, Dad Blogs, Life in these United States, SocietyLeave a comment

Back in the 80s, it was a little lean around my house. I didn’t realize it then, but I’m pretty sure my father was out of work a good bit of the decade. He’d never gotten a degree, but he was very smart and had a knack for working with machines and electrical things so he’d been fairly successful just based on prior experience. My new stepmom had not yet started working, so we were solely reliant on my father’s salary–and maybe a little “state support” if you know what I mean.

I’m not certain where all of our money came from that decade, but I vividly remember my stepmother collecting green stamps and pasting them in a booklet and using them for groceries. I assumed they were a local store promotion, but in retrospect, maybe that’s what food-stamps looked like in Alabama during Carter’s presidency.

To make ends meet, my parents tried a lot of different things, some more successful than others. For instance, my father installed a hot-water-heater timer that automatically turned the water heater off during non-peak hours. This little doo-dad was mechanical and I remember that, as a seven-year-old, it was extremely difficult to “flip the switch” on it when you needed to turn it on out-of-hours. I can remember coming home late of a night from being out of town and needing hot water. I’d have to go through the garage, climb up on a table and trip the switch. And every time I did it, for some reason I expected to get shocked. I don’t know why…

My father tried to get into dog-breeding once, as well. We had a beautiful Doberman female. After successfully breeding her, she had a litter of 9 pups and promptly developed mastitis, which quickly put an end to any future breeding endeavors.

But perhaps my folks’ most enduring moneymaker was a plastic sign-making business. Plastic was a fairly novel thing then. And being able to make signs out of plastic, versus metal or some other material, was much less expensive.

Our “business” consisted of a giant vacuum molding machine and a hundred thin sheets of different colored plastic, each approximately 4′ x 4′. With this, you could create just about any kind of sign as long as you had the mold or template and whoever we purchased the equipment from also provide a large catalog of rubber molds you could purchase for use.

The actual sign-making process was fascinating to me, even then. Once you selected your rubber sign mold, you put it on the bottom of the machine. Above that, you placed your sheet of plastic–usually white. Once you closed the lid and flipped a switch, the plastic would begin heating up. And this is where it got tricky..and hot! Everything was manual then; there were no electronic dials or automation, so you’d have to squat down and watch the plastic slowly heat, breathing in hot plastic fumes all the while. When it got to the point where the plastic was so hot that it was started to droop down in the middle due to gravity, you had to very quickly do the following: shut off the heater, flip on the vacuum, and then push the handle that lowered the plastic onto the rubber mold. The drama was palpable and the noise from the vacuum was like a Harley Davidson thundering through the garage and every time we did it, my heart would thump in my chest and I felt like I was having a mini panic attack! But if you did everything correctly, almost as soon as you lowered the shelf onto the plastic, the vacuum sucked the hot plastic over the mold, and voila! You had your sign. You then reversed all your switches and louvers and you were done.

Slightly less exciting, we could also make engraved wooden signs. Most of the engraving sign business involved office name tags for doors and desks and all you did was put letter templates in a row and then trace the letters with a “pen” attached to a long arm, which was attached on the other end to a router that similarly traced the letter pattern onto a piece of plastic that looked like wood. Not nearly as fun, but probably more profitable.

My brother was old enough to help make the engraved signs for doors and desks, but I was too young to do much of anything. Still, I used to love to watch my parents make the signs. Once you had the mold you needed for you signs you could then turn around and create as many of that type of sign as you wanted. Most of the templates were for things you might attach to your vehicle using magnetic tape, such as “For Sale” signs, or other common things like “Plumber” or “Electrician.” My brother and I used to love to play with the rubber molds. There was something really cool about a floppy, soft, rubbery thing that you could bend and twist. For us, it was something new and interesting, and therefore, something our parents didn’t want us messing with.

Not long after my parents took possession of all of the equipment, my brother and I snuck into the garage to look through the catalog. I remember thumbing through it and coming on a section of, what was then, very racy sign mold templates. I don’t know why, but one, in particular, struck me and it has stuck with me all these years. It was a nut and bolt, each with human characteristics–a face, arms, and legs–and the bolt was behind the nut, presumably about to screw itself into the nut and the caption on it read, “Not without a washer!”

I think my brother had to explain it to me at first, but once I understood what the sign inferred, I was dumbfounded that my parents would be involved in a business where they might make such a sign. I mean, we weren’t terribly religious then, but there was certainly never any sexual innuendo bantered around the house. Looking back, I still can’t imagine what business scenario might require such a sign. Maybe at a strip-club, or as a joke in a mechanic’s shop?

I searched for this design and found several versions of it in random places, like this one on Etsy:

The one we could order wasn’t quite like this, but the gist is the same. Scandalous, no?

Considering what all happened in the 70s, this was probably pretty tame for most adults; but for a kid, pure magic!

I don’t think I ever looked at my parents the same after that. Not that they ever made a sign like this, to my knowledge, but the idea that they were involved in something where this was even a consideration, changed how I viewed them.

As I got older, my parents became more involved in church and got more “religious.” Our involvement in the church waxed and waned for various reasons, but it struck me that despite whatever we choose to practice in our personal lives, just existing in this world sometimes requires a certain “moral flexibility” to steal a phrase from “Grosse Point Blank.” I guess the alternative is to draw a line in the sand and say, “This is not something I’m willing to bend on,” but then, we’ve seen how well that has worked out for many, especially of late.

Closure

On By Chris SoutherIn A Boy's Life, Family, Fatherhood, Life in these United StatesLeave a comment

forest-gb8186bad3_1920

June 22, 2020
****************************
At 1:58 this past Tuesday I closed all legal proceedings on my late father’s estate. It was a quietly bitter-sweet victory in a long and emotionally-charged process that I don’t wish on anyone who has lost someone they truly care for.

To quickly recap, my father was diagnosed with Stage 3 lung cancer in the spring of 2018. He fought it but lost his fight October 18th of that same year. At the time, he lived with a wealthy but (and I say this without any humor) evil woman who refused to share him with his family and who constantly lied to her friends and family about our (lack of) concern for him. She was the widow of a fairly wealthy financial wizard who left her a more-than-tidy sum. She had two daughters whom she had put through school and who, according to my father, she annual presented with approximately $30K – $50K in cash and/or gifts. Her house was about 6000 sq. feet and had a garage large enough to hold her $250K Winnebago, which she was only able to enjoy thanks to my father who did all the driving and maintenance, which was not insubstantial.

The truth is, she was a sick woman. Sicker than she would admit, according to my father who had confessed to me that her memory was increasingly a problem. But she was so dependent on him that she wouldn’t let him out of her sight unless it was to have him do something benefitting her. Her dependence also meant she was extremely selfish. For example, despite being quite wealthy, she refused to pay for garbage pick-up. Instead, she required my father to drive their trash to the local dump. Once when I was visiting about 3 months before he died, she made him “take out the trash,” at which point, I discovered the first of many eccentricities. To say I was incredulous is an understatement. Here he was, a very sick man, and he’s hauling the trash to the dump to save her a few dollars.

For a time, the family tried very hard to include her in things despite our feelings towards her. Both she and my father were invited to family get-togethers, but either she would come and act terribly put-upon, or she would beg off and implore my father not to leave her. I invited them once to my home, only to have her make passive-aggressive comments about our financial situation (which is fine) and how having to climb the stairs in our home made her legs hurt. The latter was the excuse my father gave for neither of them ever coming again. When I invited just him, he said he couldn’t leave her because she got too upset when he left her for any length of time.

Eventually, she aliented the entire family, at which point most of us gave up any pretense of liking her and tried our best to open my father’s eyes to the truth. A point of note here; towards the end, I did manage to have a few moments alone with him at his house and when I begged him to leave and come with us, he looked at me with what appeared to be complete resignation in his eyes and simply said, “No.”  I don’t know how much of his refusal was out of loyalty to her for having provided for him for a decade, or how much of it was his not wanting to be a burden on me and my family. Possibly a bit of both. Either way, I knew then I wouldn’t see him again.

Before he died, he signed a Will turning over his meager belongings to me with a gentlemen’s agreement that all of his money would go towards college funds for my three children. But, when he died, a new Will was released. The new Will did that exact same thing, only it forced the issue through Trusts. This was “her” doing. She didn’t trust her own family, so she didn’t think my dad should either. And of course, he went along with it to make her happy.

Little did he know how much this legal framework was going to cost his “estate,” eating deeply into an already meager final financial reckoning. Not to mention how much additional work it put on me, the Administrator, setting up estate accounts, then trusts, selling property and moving assets around, even coming out of my own pocket to pay for things the courts required upfront and which, if I funded it out of the Trust, which is my legal right, would further eat into what was designated as “college money” for my children.

I cursed my father often. I hated him for what he’d done and not just “what” he had done, but that he had done it at all. To be honest, I’m still not sure how I feel about what he did. I understand the situation he was in, but I also can’t imagine doing the same thing to one of my children.

*****************
Completed on 12.31.2021

It’s been more than a year since I wrote the first part of this blog. I have largely moved past anger into acceptance. Acceptance that my father was just a man. A flawed and possibly haunted man. Haunted by a past of choices made, promises kept, and loyalties misplaced. Today, I think I mostly feel betrayed. Though I’m adopted, my father never treated me like an adopted child. At least, not until he died. He wasn’t an emotional, touchy-feely man, but I had always felt that he would do anything for me if I just asked.

Which is what made his passing so devastating for me, and the rest of the family frankly. A lifetime of loyalty–ours to him and vice versa–tossed away and handed to some “Johnny come lately” in his life. Betrayal and disappointment. Those are my feelings. I doubt they will ever go away.

My father didn’t “die” of lung cancer. Though he did have terminal Stage 3 cancer, he died of a self-inflicted gunshot to the head. The irony is that I had taken his old rifles and shotgun home with me a couple of months before. The one he used was one of his newer ones that, I’m assuming, his partner bought him, which he didn’t feel obligated to give me.

So far as I know, and I admittedly don’t know much, there was no note left. I spoke with the ME and he believes it was self-inflicted; something I did question. When he died, his partner didn’t call any of the family. Most of my family in NC has a long history of volunteer work at the Fire Department and even those that are retired from it now still keep a police scanner running in their homes, day and night.

My cousin who is retired from the Dept. heard the call come over the radio. She called me as soon as she knew what had happened. Two of my other cousins  (still active) were dispatched to the home. I’m told his partner was very blase’ and told them, “If you want to see him, he’s in there,” referring to his body, lying in a pool of blood in the bathroom. She showed no remorse; no pity; no emotion, according to them.

Living in Atlanta, it took me three hours to get there. By the time I arrived, his body was gone and the police were pulling away. Since she was his wife, all of the rights and decisions were hers to make. His partner refused me entry into her home, as I had discussed with my father that she probably would. Obviously upset, I yelled at the closed door about what a horrible person she was. As I did, a neighbor came over and made a derogatory comment, asking if I was the son, “Who never came to see him in ten years.” I laugh-cried, partly at the absurdity of the statement, and partly at the audacity his partner showed lying to everyone about what had really been going on. But she had them all fooled.

When I drove away from her house that day, it was the last time I would see her. The “second Will” named me the Executor of his estate, and blessedly, he had also already made arrangements for his body to be cremated. I was thankful that, at least, his wife/partner would not be allowed to dictate the terms of his final wishes.

Why did he do it? I’ll never know for sure. What I suspect is that he reached a conclusion. After months of irreversible lung cancer eating at him, and I believe, facing the cruel reality of his family (myself included) finally having given up after years of calls and two-hour visits, which always resulted in his partner even further alienating him from us, he reached a decision. That decision being that he was not going to get better. He was only going to get worse and without admitting himself into Hospice–something he would rather die than do–he made the decision to unburden this world and those around him of his existence. He once confided to me that his partner had told him she wished he’d just go into Hospice care. He didn’t want to ever be that helpless.

A couple of weeks after his passing, I got a call from my lawyer. My father’s widow had suffered a mild heart attack and while at the hospital, called her lawyer and said that I had caused her illness. My lawyer called to find out if, in fact, I had spoken to his widow and if so, what had transpired.

I told my lawyer the truth; I hated the woman but I had not seen or spoken to her since I pulled away from her house the day my father died. My lawyer laughed, told me to keep doing the same, and that was the last I heard from his widow, or her lawyer.

Never in a million years could I have imagined an ending like this. Even today, knowing my father’s religious beliefs about suicide, I have trouble believing he took his own life. But I understand. I believe he felt that it was the last decision he could make that was truly his. If he had stayed and gotten sicker, which he would have, he knew his partner would send him to Hospice as soon as it was apparent he was no longer capable of self-care. And he knew that, being his wife, there was absolutely nothing the rest of us could do about it.

And since he had made it clear he would accept no help from the family unless it was us coming to him and having to deal with his partner, something we had all tried at one point or another only to have our help thrown back in our faces later, he knew he was on his own. By marrying “her,” he had sealed his own fate. She was now and forever, his lifeblood and legal decision maker.

There’s more to my father’s story, post-death, and maybe I’ll include it in later blogs. But, I felt this one needed an ending, a little closure. If for no one else, but me. I only wish I felt a satisfactory closure to my father’s life, but I’ll have to accept that some things will forever remain uncertain and unsatisfactorily resolved.

Featured

Boys Will Be Boys, But Bullies Ruin it for Everyone

On By Chris SoutherIn A Boy's Life, Dad Blogs, Life in these United States, SocietyLeave a comment

I was in 5th grade. After that thing my brother did, which resulted in his being forcefully removed from our house and becoming a ward of the state, life changed for us. At the time, I went to a good school; we lived in a great neighborhood for riding bicycles; I had my own room. Life was not bad, for me.

But after my brother left home, it went downhill fast. I was too young to understand the adult complexities that come with your child doing something horrible, but from the cautionary, muffled conversations I heard between my step-mom and my dad, and others in the family, I know there was a lot of embarrassment and general unease in our community, both within our neighborhood and our church.

I guess I can understand my parents’ decision to sell our house and move to another town. It wasn’t too far away, but far enough that we would no longer see any of our old neighbors or friends, and far enough away that I had to change schools right when I was starting the 6th grade.

In short, we moved to the country (more on it in this blog about our house and my friend, Joe). While I wasn’t exactly a city boy, I might as well have been from Saturn with glowing eyes and antennae coming out of my head. The established boys in my new neighborhood took an immediate and distinct dislike to me from the get-go. In fact, it wasn’t just the boys in my neighborhood, but a number of boys in my grade.

Today, society has a low tolerance for bullies. But back then, “bullying” was just boys being boys and if you didn’t want to be bullied, then you’d better learn how to avoid them or learn how to fight. At the time, I weighed in at a mere 60 pounds in 6th grade, so the best option for me seemed to be avoidance.

Every day I walked behind the portable classrooms to avoid the two boys who always used the well-traveled walkway behind the cafeteria and who, if they saw me, liked to physically push me around and tell me about all the horrible things they would do to me if they ever caught me off-campus. There was the boy in P.E. who also hated me for some unknown reason. This particular bully kept at it for nigh on a year until one day I snapped, threw him down, grabbed his legs and began dragging him all over the football field. To this day I don’t understand why I did that versus just straddling him and pummeling his face. I think it was over fear of actually hitting him, which I get into later.

To avoid all confrontation, I helped out just about anyone who asked, with their homework or with a “loaned” pencil or some paper that I never got back. In general, I did everything I could to stay under the radar and avoid a pummeling. But you know, boys will be boys. Bullies can smell fear and nothing makes them feel bigger than to see a kid they’ve picked on, running scared.

By far the worst of the lot was a kid in my neighborhood named “Craig.” Craig was a little taller than me, but he outweighed me by about 20 pounds. He and I were about like Ralphie and the bigger Farcus brother from “A Christmas Story.” Now, I didn’t have any classes with Craig. I assume that’s because he wasn’t terribly smart, which is probably why he overcompensated by being so hateful.

In the mornings I rode my bike over to another boy’s house (James) in the neighborhood to catch the bus. The bus wouldn’t come down our street, so we all had to meet it out on the main road. I don’t know why, but for some reason, James liked me well enough that, not only did he not pick on me, but he let me warm up inside his house in the morning after my bike ride, and he let me keep my bike at his house during school. James and I weren’t buddy-buddy enough that he took up for me over Craig and his cronies, but he was a big enough kid that nobody messed with him or his brother, a very large boy-man named “Boogie” who never wore a long-sleeved shirt or coat even in the winter. Boogie hardly ever gave me a second glance, but I got a sense from him that, while he was large and feared, he wasn’t mean. And I like to think that if anything had ever gone down around Boogie, he would have stepped in and at least stopped it. So James and Boogie were the Canada of the neighborhood–at least politically–so when I was with the two of them everyone basically left me alone.

After dropping my bike off at James’ house of a morning, I’d wait for him to finish getting ready, and then we would head out to the bus stop where I did my best to avoid looking at Craig, or his cronies. Because, like anyone in jail can tell you, eye contact is a form of aggression and I wanted to avoid that at all costs.

Still, I knew they watched me and whispered about me, and shot daggers from their eyes at me while I looked at anything BUT them. And the name-calling, man I heard it all. Mostly, it was words you can’t say these days without getting nailed with a hate crime, but back then it was just standard bully-fare.

Afternoon bus rides home were more of the same except I only had to avoid Craig and his bunch as they boarded the bus and moved to the back. Once we got off the bus my Canada protection-neutrality vanished once I got my bike, or on the unfortunate rainy days when I had to walk because my bike couldn’t make it through the 6-inches of muddy slush created by a freshly grated dirt road and an inch of rain.

After about a year of taunting, even Craig’s lackies became emboldened and started following me for about 1/10 of a mile off the bus, yelling obscenities and pushing me in the back. One particular boy, who became the worst of the non-Craig boys, was smaller than me but what he lacked in stature he made up in colorful language and bravado. And he was merciless.

Now, I had always been taught not to start fights. It was particularly stressed in my house because of my brother, who, before he was taken away, started–and won–more fights than I’ve ever been in. It was my genuine belief that if I got into a fight, whether I won or got my butt whipped, I’d face a certain butt-whipping from my father when I got home. And my father favored belts.

So, I put up with Craig and his ilk for far longer than I would have preferred. But little did I know that one summer day in 1985, I was about to do something that would at least grant me a reprieve for a time.

It started off typically. I got off the bus and for some reason that I can’t remember, I was walking home that day, which always extended the length of the taunting because it was easy for them to keep up with me. I remember vividly cutting through someone’s yard, which opened up into a wooded field where no houses had been built. This particular day, Craig was staying back and letting his minions handle the taunting.

This smaller boy I mentioned was walking just behind me and off my right shoulder. He had been calling me names for a good two or three minutes and there were several other boys walking behind him, egging him on as he worked me like a prize-fighter. As he got right up behind me to yell in my ear again, “fight or flight” took over and I spun around with a backhand, hoping to connect with his head. I missed. He may have been little, but the kid was quick and he dropped to the ground as I came around.

Though I didn’t connect with my would-be Joey LaRusso roundabout spin-move, it impressed upon him that maybe today wasn’t the day to pick on someone willing to fight and who happened to be bigger than you. I kept on walking and though they continued the name-calling and yelling, it lacked the usual vehemence it usually had and they stopped following me. A moral victory.

For a while, things quieted down. Sometimes with boys all they need to see is a willingness to stand up for yourself. Once they realize you’re not quite the victim they thought, self-preservation forces self-introspection, which inevitably leads to a decision to find an easier target.

About a year later, after a relatively quiet period of non-violence, Craig decided to start up on me again. I don’t know why, or what the catalyst was, but it was if nothing had ever happened and almost literally overnight, we were back to being sworn enemies.

By this time, the bus route had changed and instead of our having to get off at the front of the neighborhood and me riding or walking back to my house, the bus stopped about two-tenths of a mile from my house. One day on the ride home, I could hear Craig and his friends threatening me quietly from the back of the bus. I could hear them say they were getting off at my stop. I figured they were bluffing until they didn’t get off at their stop, at which point I knew I had troubles.

My adrenaline pumping and my heart racing, I stepped off the bus and immediately started walking home. Never turning around to check who else might be with me, I could hear the bus pull away and for just a minute, I thought I was safe. Then rocks began whizzing by my head, thumping into the red dirt as the boys pelted me with quarter-sized pebbles.

I don’t know what made me turn around that day. Maybe I’d finally just gotten tired of living in fear–of them and my father–or maybe it was the fact that I had gotten a little bigger and felt that I actually had a chance of winning a fight. As I got nearer, a few more rocks flew at me but even those stopped as I approached their group. I stopped just a few feet from Craig as he stood there glowering. Silently, I dropped my backpack on the ground; my heart beating out of my chest. I knew today was the day. It was him or me. No matter how it turned out, and no matter what my dad did to me when he found out, I knew that if I didn’t face Craig today, I’d have to live in fear the rest of my days there.

I looked at Craig and said, “Come on. Hit me.”

Any real fighter will tell you that you don’t wait for the other person to hit you first. Your best bet is to hit them first with everything you’ve got and hope it’s enough. But, I believed that if I could get Craig to swing at me first, then maybe I could get some leniency with my father, especially if I ended up losing the fight. But Craig just stood there glaring, not saying a word. So, I taunted him more, “Come on, hit me! You’ve been picking on me for years. Let’s do this!”

Craig just stood there. He didn’t say a word. He just stood there. “WTH?” I thought.

Finally, I pursed my lips, turned around, picked up my bag, and headed home, fully expecting someone to come crashing down on my back and for the pummeling to begin.

It never came.

After that, Craig and his friends left me alone. There were still sneers and dirty looks, but the days of picking were mostly over. I suppose they realized there was some fight in me and in the last couple of years, I’d managed to close the size gap between Craig and me and I probably wasn’t quite as easy a victim as they’d once thought. Maybe once I was actually standing in front of him at eye-level, he realized he might not come out of the fight as well as he thought. And losing to this city kid was something his reputation would never recover from.

Not long after, we were having a family get-together at my house and it came out that I had been dealing with, not only Craig, but other bullies at school. My dad was furious. Not at me, but at the situation. The school knew I was being bullied and offered no help and never reported it to my parents. When my father asked me why I didn’t stand up for myself, I told him I was afraid of what would happen at home. When he heard that, he immediately started showing me a few “moves” that could help me at least hold my own.

There was still an admonition to never “start a fight,” but my father wanted to make sure I didn’t have to continue living in fear. He told me that if someone else starts it, he wouldn’t be mad at me for standing up for myself, no matter what happened. It was a small turning point in my relationship with him, but an important one.

To this day, nothing chaps me more than a bully. It doesn’t have to be a physical bully like Craig, either. Bullies come in all shapes and sizes. Some are physical, while others verbally bully people, usually through coercion and fear, or by withholding something they know you need. I’ve run into a few of them in my professional career.

But no matter the method, they’re all the same to me–bullies. And maybe part of why I beat myself up in the gym, and ran until the joints in my feet fused, is because I regret the years I lived in fear. I never want that for my own kids and so I’ve continued my father’s “don’t start it, but finish it” philosophy with them. They know I don’t want them to start a fight, but they also know I don’t want them walking away from one, or encouraging others to continue bullying by ignoring it and hoping it goes away.

Boys will be boys, or at least some of them will be. No amount of gender-neutrality can take away the biological desire to eliminate the competition. We can teach our children right or wrong, however; and when diplomacy fails, I expect them to protect themselves and their families. I consider it part of my responsibility as a father and I think my father did too.

Round Here – A fall day in D.C.

On By Chris SoutherIn A Boy's Life, Life in these United States2 Comments

Had anyone asked me, before I joined up with the US Air Force, to describe my situation three years from the day I caught the bus in Mobile, headed to the MEPS station in Montgomery, my description certainly wouldn’t have included the words, “depressed” and “bored.” Mix in “the Pentagon” and it sounds less like a four-year duty station and more like some trippy dream you have during REM sleep right before you wake up to the sound of your alarm reminding you of the math test you’re going to fail in 45 minutes.

Living on a military base governed by a wing of the military in which you did not enlist should be high on the list of “Things the Government Shouldn’t Do To Military Personnel“; but, they do. I spent nigh on four years, enlisted in the Air Force, but living on tiny, boring, very little to do, Fort Myer in Arlington, VA, an Army base. Not to be confused with Fort Myers (note: plural) in Florida, which is not a military base, but is in fact, fun and wonderful.

Fort Myer in Virginia resides at the top of Arlington National Cemetary. Among other things, it’s purpose is to monitor and protect the cemetary and provide the elite guard watching over the “Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.” The base itself, which is less than 2 miles at its widest point, includes (at the time I was there) a sundries store (think…low-rent Walmart with about 1/50th the selection), a BX (that’s a grocery store to Johnny Civilian), a bowling facility, a small movie facility, a squash court, basketball court, small track, and various administrative complexes. There is very little to do on-base.

Now, if you snuck through the fence at the back of the base, you could get onto a Marine facility, which was even more poorly arranged, with the exception of a much better sundries store, where I purchased this green recliner which, to this day, my wife maintains was blue. Granted, looking at this picture, I can understand why she feels that way; however, I assure you, it was not blue.

My green chair with my friend Brian Tardif enjoying a beer. Bottom left is my “roommate” with whom I shared this room for all of about two weeks when he arrived on site. Shortly thereafter, he hooked up with a gal and lived off-base for the entirety of my time there, leaving me with the coveted room to myself.

Most of us who lived on Ft. Myer and were in the Air Force, but working at the Pentagon, worked various shifts. As such, it was of utmost importance that your living conditions be conducive to a number of factors and situations, including:

  • Blackout curtains so you could sleep during the day.
  • A noise barrier pushed up against the bottom of your door to keep out unwanted noise from the echo-chamber hallways built of cinder blocks and concrete ceilings and floors.
  • A refrigerator so you could store you own groceries to cook when you’re awake (because you’re working night shift) and the base kitchens are all closed.
  • Various black-market cooking appliances you had to hide in your closet each day when you left your room due to any number of unannounced inspections. Generally, our Air Force commanding officer understood the situation in which many of us worked and was not unsympathetic to our plight. In return, he made allowances for us breaking the Army’s rule of “NO COOKING” in the barracks as long as he couldn’t see it when he did his cursory inspections.
  • An unspoken competition among various rooms as to who had the best electronics setup; a contest in which I was a perennial “also-ran,” but never quite the winner.
  • Cable television.
The picture on the left was my room the first couple of years at Ft. Myer. I got into weightlifting and since I spent a great deal of time alone, in the middle of the night, awake because I was used to working mid shift and everyone else was asleep, I surrounded myself with various entertainment and motivations; pictures of weightlifters, posters of hotties, lots and lots of VHS-taped movies (I switched premium channel subscriptions regularly to get the best range of titles). When I couldn’t stand the four walls any longer, I’d go on late-night runs around the base. Due to the base’s location, it was not recommended that you go off base by yourself at night; but looking back, I sure wish I had. It would have made for much more interesting runs.

The picture on the right is my room the last year or so of my enlistment. It’s the exact same furniture, only used more creatively, providing more storage and generally allowing me to “straighten up” everything. Oh, and I got rid of most of the posters.

Despite my best efforts, the long nights awake in my room with no one to talk to, and even lonelier nights AT work where I frequently worked by myself in a nuclear-war survivable metal box, designed to be maintained by a single Airman in case of an attack, eventually began to wear thin. My parents divorced within months of my leaving home and my “back-home” girlfriend and I had broken up a few months back. I wasn’t terribly torn up about it, but I hadn’t yet been able to replace her with a new relationship, so all in all I was feeling pretty alone. I was also about a year younger than most of the others in the barracks, so when they all went out partying at the clubs–the ones requiring that you be 21 just to get in–I stayed home. All of that, combined with a growing tendency towards introversion, contributed to my becoming more and more…not depressed, but certainly, withdrawn.

Looking back now I recognize the mental place I was in and it wasn’t good. I needed a lift; something to pull me up and help me refocus on the good in life.

My friend Brian Tillett (another Brian) was off the same day as I. While I technically worked in “Tech Control,” Tillett (everyone called everyone by their last name) worked in Cryptography. I kept the communication lines working and Tillett made sure all of the communication lines stayed encrypted. We didn’t work together, but we frequently worked in the same facility and spent more than a few shifts watching Letterman, performing maintenance on the “world’s oldest electronics” and generally trying to avoid “guard duty,” a requirement to stand around and keep an eye on non-secured visitors to the area for anything as generic as “A/C maintenance.” These guard duties could last five minutes or five hours and all you could do was stand, or sit there, and do nothing but watch. It was interminably miserable.

Anyway, this particular day, we were both off work. Most of our friends were either still on day-shift, or preparing for swings, so we found ourselves separately with nothing to do and lots of time on our hands. I’d been feeling very detached of late and spending a great deal of time exercising if, for no other reason, than out of boredom. Sitting in my room, I heard a knock on my door, and opened it to find Tillett. We made small talk for a few minutes; neither of us coming up with anything the other wanted to do. Finally, Tillett said, “You want to just go for a drive?”

Now, at the time, I didn’t have a car on base. To get to and from the Pentagon every day, I usually caught a ride with someone. But, I’d never ridden with Tillett. He had this gorgeous Trans Am, a drop-top that rumbled when you cranked it up.

We hopped in his car and headed off base. No particular destination in mind, we just drove. I remember that neither of us spoke much. Tillett, perhaps feeling a bit of my mood too, put on Counting Crows, the August and Everything After album. You know, the good one. And while Adam Duritz belted out beautifully despondent songs like “Round Here” and “Perfect Blue Buildings,” I closed my eyes and reveled in the fall wind whipping through my hair and the feeling that I was living a nearly perfect moment; my cares lifted and my emotions soaring for the first time in far too long.

I don’t remember anything else about that day, but I remember that hour. Rarely since have I felt such peace and freedom. Maybe that’s why I love fall so much today; the faint hope that I’ll recapture that same feeling just once more in my lifetime.

I’ve mentioned before here on my blog that I wish I could go back and tell all the people in my life what they meant to me and how much they impacted my life. Tillett and I were never that close, and he’s a big-wig in the security space now, so this isn’t something I’d feel comfortable hitting him up on LinkedIn and telling him. Still, maybe he’ll stumble across this blog one day and read my simple, “Thank You.”

Brian, thank you for that day. It was one of the good ones. And there’s been far too few of them before or since.