Just a few comments on life the way I see living it.

A younger guy asked me what to do when he got out of the service a while back and I really could give him no specific answer except for this: Live your dreams because there is nothing worse than an old man that hasn’t.

I have to say that I never looked at life like a contest and to those that believe that those who die with the most toys is the winner, I say “Go for it.”

Life is pretty short and later on you will see that chasing materiel things isn’t as satisfying as you think. You can’t take it with you to the grave.

The route I have taken is that I have made memories. These I can take with me to the grave.

Some of these memories were good, some bad, but they are mine and mine alone.The only thing that can take them from me is Alzheimer's, which will take everything from everyone.

I asked the young GI if he ever had any dreams of anything and he said that he would like to just pack a bag and travel the country for a year and see what it is like in other parts.

I have to admit that when he said that, my face lit up and I told him simply to do it. I’ve hitch hiked all over the country during my twenties. It was interesting to say the least.

Schools, jobs and careers will be there when you get back. Nobody is going to steal them. In some cases a couple of good adventures on a resume may get a person over the top because it says two things; the person is willing to take a chance and they are probably a little more rounded.

I’ll admit that I didn’t venture into my present career until I was 38 years old and I never did find myself having to play catch-up. (Sometimes I feel that at 38 I was still a little young for me to start a serious career. I should have waited a bit until I had grown up a bit more.). I just fell into the ranks and did my job.

A year after I was hired as an ordinary seaman, I was an Able Seaman with a tankerman’s endorsement and three months later, I had a captain’s license.

I had simply documented my fishing and sailboat bum time and put it toward the required sea time for these and passed the required tests. My pay doubled.

I have a couple of classmates that went into teaching and to this day I wonder about them. They graduated from the same high school that I did, went straight to the local teachers college and five years after they graduated they got hired in the same damned school they graduated from.

I have always wondered what they had to bring to the classroom with them. Probably nowhere near as much as many of my teachers brought with them.

Many of my teachers had been in WW2 and had at least traveled out of the county and seen a few things here and there and had more than a simple degree in their subject. They had seen a bit of the world and brought it back to the classroom with them.

A couple of the women had traveled a bit or were at least from somewhere else and had a somewhat different background. My least favorites were the ones the young women that had simply graduated from some liberal arts school nearby and had gone straight into teaching and had grown up locally before they went to college.

A young man with a degree and a year of traveling the country has a whole lot more to bring into a classroom or for that matter a place of business. You can’t travel around for a year without learning at least something about life and other people and you sure are not going. to get that kind of education in the classroom, and there is something to be said for that.

I have recently posted parts of my life the way I have lived it and in truth I am not at all unsatisfied with things in general.

I have quite a few adventures to look back on, like the army, living for 14 months in a tipi, hitch hiking to Alaska, commercial fishing, being a sailboat bum and finally a career as a merchant seaman.

I have taken advantage of just about any half-baked opportunity that has come my way and now I have a pretty satisfying life to look back on.

Truth be known, I’m still interested in what my next adventure is going to be and I’m ready to go and take it on in a heartbeat. My employer knows that, and I think that knowing that played a small part as to why I was assigned duty in the Gulf of Mexico during the oil spill last summer.

In my 60th year, it probably will not be as physical as the things I did as a younger man, but you can bet I won’t refuse an opportunity if it interests me. I still have a lot of living to do yet.

The people I feel sorry for are those that end up old and full of regrets that they didn’t go on that trip or accept an interesting job or assignment because of some dopey reason.

The ones I really feel bad for are the ones that took a job or assignment that they hated because of the pay raise that went along with it. To me, if you are able to pay your bills and keep afloat there is no reason to take a promotion that will leave you miserable. Life is too short.

Find something you like to do and do it.

When it is all over and done with and the United States Navy commits my body to the deep, I will feel like I had a pretty interesting life.

I don’t give a damn what anyone else thinks.






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