I imagine most everyone deals with this sooner or later: dismay at how fast life has gone by. I guess it’s an affliction you get after middle age.
My midlife crisis was never a sports car and a younger wife. I wasn’t married, and sports cars had lost their appeal by then. Still liked them. Don’t get me wrong. But the older I got, the more practical I became, and let’s face it: sports cars might be fun, but they’re not practical.
Maybe not having a wife was part of it. I’d been single for literally years. I wanted someone to pass the time with rather than doing it alone. But it took a long time to find her.
I’m fifty-nine as of April 3rd of this year. I’m Gen X. Technically, I guess I came of age in the late seventies, but it seems to me it really happened in the eighties, because that’s the decade I look back on most fondly, much to my wife’s dismay.
I joined the Army in February of 1983 on the Delayed Enlistment Program, leaving my home September 6 th to begin my tour of duty. Four years. When you’re eighteen, that’s a long time. Almost a fourth of your life. It looked to me like some endless prison sentence rolling out before me.
But the economy here in Northwest Arkansas at the time was limited. For me, it was work on a farm or in a poultry processing plant, neither of which appealed to me. But I was a product of the seventies and loved muscle cars, so being a mechanic was my goal. I joined the Army to train as a 63-Bravo, which at that time was a light-wheel vehicle mechanic, power generation mechanic, and recovery specialist. Translated, that means I would work on vehicles under five tons as well as generators, and I’d learn how to run a tow truck.
As it turns out, I’m not a very good mechanic. Some people have talents in the direction. I don’t. Add in the fact that I wasn’t really a mechanic, but a parts replacer, and it was disappointing.
But while I was in, I fell in with some guys from LA. In the eighties. You know, the heavy metal days. And I get into music big time. Really wanted to make that my new career. But I knew making it in a band was a long shot, so I intended to hedge my bets by attending Berklee College of Music in Boston, not fully realizing how hard it would be to gain admission. In those days, I thought it was pretty much automatic that you got into college. After all, those were the days when schools starting really pushing getting a degree. So I checked Berklee out and decided that music engineering and production would give me a good foot in the door.
Back in the days of my youth, I made more than one poor career choice. For instance, I had what was called VEAP—the Veterans Education Assistance Program. Basically, it was the eighties version of the famous GI Bill. My original plan had been to use VEAP to attend a technical school and continue my education as a mechanic. But when I discovered that I not only had little talent as a mechanic, but didn’t really like doing it, I cancelled it and took the money I’d saved out.
Maybe a year after I did that, I learned about Berklee and didn’t have anything in place for tuition. And maybe that saved me from embarrassing myself. In addition to the usual requirements, Berklee also wants an audition tape of you playing your chosen instrument. In my case it was drums, but I didn’t have a kit to audition on.
Another possibly bad decision was opting not to go to flight school.
Helicopters have always fascinated me, and I gave serious thought somewhere around 1986 to learning to fly them courtesy of the Army. I was able to talk to my uncle, who flew choppers, and ask how to get into the program. He told me, and I investigated further, only to learn that, after eight months of flight school/warrant officer course, I’d have to give the Army another four years—and I was two-and-a-half years into my tour at that point.
No way was I doing that. I’d met my first wife by then and we were planning to be married later
that year.
And last but not least, I opted not to make the Army a career. When you’re twenty-one, giving someone twenty years of your life seems like a long, long time. I mean, that would have meant retiring in 2003. In 1986, that seemed so far off as to be unimaginable.
So, I served my four-year tour and called it quits.
And before I knew it, I woke up one day in 2003, realizing I could have done the twenty years and had a retirement check for the rest of my life. At the age of thirty-eight.
Now I’m twenty years on from that, and my daughter is thirty-six, will be thirty-seven this October. Hell, I’m not supposed to be in my thirties yet, but here I am, fifty-nine years old and feeling it most days.
So here I am, busting my butt to do just that, and hopefully retire from the day job thing in a year or so and write full time.
But better late than never, I’m trying to do something constructive with my life. I abandoned the music dream years ago—lugging around a drum kit to shows seemed too much of a hassle. But I’ve always loved reading, and even as a teenager, I entertained thoughts of being an author.
And I have a lot of life experience to draw from in my writing, even if it was mostly an aimless life.
Stick around with me and see how it turns out, okay? I’ll keep you up to date.
Happy reading,
