Counting Your Life

When I count the years of my life, they are many but have little meaning. It's much like looking at the title on an old and worn book and trying to determine what is inside. How can you tell without examining the chapters, one by one. Even they may, at times, overlap and make the story more profound.

Some think you are bragging when you mark a time with "When I was in the University' or "When I was wounded at Anzio." It's just marking our chapters.

I sit in the house that my wife, two children, and I occupied many years ago. Soon two more children were added. I planted a garden and had a couple of horses. Soon my four children were grown and my garden spot was left barren.

Sitting at the dining table today, I look out at squirrels playing under and upon a pecan tree that is at least sixty, perhaps seventy, feet tall, that stands in the middle of what was my barren garden spot. When my children were grown, that giant tree was not even a pecan. That pecan tree has sprouted and grown since my grown children and I buried their wonderful Mother. I remarried, loved, and buried another good wife while that tree was growing.

Yes, my years are many and it is said that those who share my age and history are departing at about a thousand per day. I am working on a new chapter. The contents are yet to be discovered. It may be a short chapter with few paragraphs. Again, it may be long enough for another tree to grow.

To really know a person, you can't just survey the package, You must examine each sentence and choice of words, glean the meaning to each paragraph, catch the direction of each chapter as they build upon each
other. Only when this is finished will you perhaps be able to understand and really know the person, the well read book, the finished story, that you look upon.

To begin this story, one fact must be established; I was born. I wasn't the first born or the second, I was the last of three brothers who were all born in the same county. Just to be different, I was born in town instead of in a country farmhouse as my brothers had been. In a separate chapter in my parents life, My sister had been born in a large city. She was junior to my brothers but a little more than four years older than me. She played a very important part in my early life because for some reason, she seemed to like me.

When I fell, she picked me up. When I was dirty, she would wash me, and when I goofed up, she would make things right. Our picture was taken with a huge camera and powder that made a bright light, noise, and a lot of smoke. We did not smile. I was four years old and dressed in a "pretty little sunsuit" which, even at that age, I didn't like. I wanted long pants like the 'other men.'

In my grade school years, I was sickly and sheltered at every turn. I rebeled at being kept inside when I wanted to chop wood or care for the animals. I don't think I was mean but I didn't want to be different. When I was ten, my oldest brother offered me five dollars when I could do five chin-ups, Three years later, I collected. In my neighborhood there was three girls and two boys to play with but I spent most of my time with the boy who lived across the road. Sometimes we fought and then we played some more. We argued and then made up until our teen years. I went to work part time when I was thirteen learning to be a meatcutter and driving a grocery delivery truck. No driver's license was required at that time. For about fourteen or fifteen hours on Saturday I was paid a whole silver dollar.

Attending school and my work prevented my involvement in sports except for a little golden gloves boxing and distance running. Girls seemed to occupy a little of my time, too. A bunch of teens would gather in the park and play guitars and sing, wrestle, do tricks on bicycles. Surprisingly little hugging and kissing. No one thought they 'belonged' to someone else. If we went to a show our date was whoever was convenient at the time.

We had very little money and one night, five boys on a stripped down jalopy drove to one of the very first drive-ins with one nickel in hand. We all knew this pretty carhop. We ordered and recieved one bottled coke (5 cents) and five straws. Sometimes with our combined change, we would put a half gallon of gasoline in the old stripdown car. Most boys were dropping out of school at about the eigth grade and joining the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) or the Army where they would get about fifteen dollars a month plus food and uniform. I hung on until Fall semester of the twelth grade in December, 1941. I tried to get into flying school and was turned down because of colorblindness.

I made a lot of mistakes in that chapter of my life of which I am not proud. To make the story short, I was married with children when the army decided they wanted me and my colorblindness. It seems I can see through camouflage. After service in the South Pacific and Japan, I returned to the the US and was divorced. I was very bitter and filled with a desire to hurt people. I went to another state and did just that for some time.

I soon became disgusted with myself and caught the bus to return home. I made a halfhearted attempt to make things right but that didn't happen. One night I was walking with a co-worker and his wife when we met a group of the wife's friends. We were introduced but I couldn't see but one. With her back to a jewelry store window filled with precious stones, those blue eyes, blonde hair, and perfect compection made the jewelry look cheap.

I wanted to ask her for a date but, with 27 stitches in my scalp and a discolored face, I thought I didn't need to embarrass myself. Life is marked by strange milestones. She was a waitress in the best cafe in town and I went there for supper a couple of nights after our introduction. She had a date that night but she got off early. He wasn't there. I was. She changed me and, for the next thirty four years, blessed my life