Just some guy I met several years ago.

Recently I did a post on nicknames at sea.

There is another guy with a nickname here that bears having the tale told. I met this guy several years ago in Ohio when I was passing through to Camp Perry. I took a long route as there was someone I wanted to see along the way.

The guy's nickname is Charlie, and you better pronounce the letter 'r' in it correctly. Charlie is pretty proud of that nickname, which his father gave him when he was a little kid. His real name is actually something Laotion. He's a second generation American. His father and mother moved here before he was born.

Interesting character.

His dad hit this country running and instantly got a job and headed straight to the nearest English as a second language course he could find and worked his ass off at both work and school. His dad worked hard at learning to speak Engllish, yet I guess could never manage to lose his Laotion accent completely.

Not Charlie, though. Charlie speaks perfect Americanized English and part of the reason is that his dad worked damned hard to make sure his kids learned to speak it well.

Charlie's dad worked hard at trying to be a good American and from what I gather has done a pretty good job. Charlie was pretty funny about it when he told me about his dad and it made me chuckle. His dad wanted to run his own business and wanted to make sure his kids fit in to his newly adopted homeland. He moved his brood to Ohio where the English is fairly unaccented and where he could open a real American business, like a pizza place.

Hey, what is more American than a pizza delivery business, unless it is a hamburger stand?

So Charlie grew up delivering pizzas after school, which is pretty American as far as I am concerned. Working in the family business as a kid is an American value we see a little less of every year which it a little sad. Some evenings he ran the whole business while his dad attended yet another ESL class to improve his English.

He got his nickname from his father as a little kid. His dad was having problems with the letter 'r' as used in the English language so he gave his son a nickname with the difficult letter in it so as to use it often coupled with the thought that he ought to Anglicize his son's name.

So Charlie became Charlie and you had best pronounce it correctly.

He's pretty proud of his nickname and I damned well don't blame him.

While Charlie had grown up and was a salesman when I met him, he still drops by the family pizza place and give his dad a hand. Like a lot of immigrants I'd bet that if Charlie's dad can still walk, the pizza place is still open for business.

No moral, just a pretty neat story about a guy I met on my way to Camp Perry several years ago.
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Why I post in this blog daily is sometimes beyond me, but I do it anyway.

Sometimes it is a challenge getting a post off with the internet on board ship because it is sometimes pretty intermittent. It is also somewhat of a challenge to see if I can pull yet another post out of my arse that makes sense and is palatable for public consumption.

This is a discipline for me and there are sometimes days when I simply do not feel like sitting at a keyboard and cranking out yet another piece. I have over 800 posts so far and last summer when I was working in the Gulf cleaning up a mess that BP made I had no internet for days at a time. I wrote anyeway and posted when we got into range.

I guess it just gives me a purpose to get up and feel like I did something that day.



my other blog is: http://officerpiccolo.blogspot.com/ http://piccolosbutler.blogspot.com/