Marilyn Monroe is famously quoted as saying, "Ever notice that 'what the hell' is always the right decision?"
I'd
like to add that you often reach that decision state when you're tired.
Frankly, a lot of the major directional decisions I've made in my life
were made when I was tired. I'm tired right now, but I've got this
thought in me and it has to come out.
When I interviewed with the company that I still work for, SMS, (now Siemens), I came right off an all-nighter at the computer
lab and right into the interview. I knew instantly that this was the
company I wanted to work for and canceled all my other interviews as I
walked out. Now that I think of it, I guess it's a good thing they
hired me. 
The
interview was in January, they hired me and I didn't start until I
graduated in August. It did take the pressure off the last couple of
semesters. What's more, this is what I looked like when I interviewed
and they hired me anyway!
I
also made the decision to join the Navy when I was tired. I was going
to school full time and working full time so when my friend Bob Deeter
suddenly suggested we should just join the Navy, I followed Marilyn
Monroe's sage advice (as I always try to do) and said, 'What the hell'
and we joined up.
We took the summer off before heading off to
camp, I wrote about that in a previous blog entry. I also had the
opportunity to drive my mother up to Minnesota to see her family. We
went in my mauve Rambler American, the first new car I ever owned. Hey,
don't laugh, it was a 
good
car, I gave it to my father when I went in the Navy and he drove it
practically the rest of his life. One of the high points of that trip
was loading Mom, Grandma, Grandpa and Uncle Edwin in the car and having
some clown run a stop sign and hit the car hard enough to spin it all
around. Ha ha, what fun. No one was hurt and damage to the car was
barely noticeable. Boy, they don't make cars like that anymore.
On
the way back to Miami, we visited my cousin Audrey and her
husband-to-be Andrew Houlihan. They were living in New Orleans and I
distinctly remember deciding that as long as we were in the
neighborhood, we would have to swing by and see them. Yeah, it's hard to
reconcile how Minnesota and New Orleans were in the same
'neighborhood'. But I'm so glad we did because I got to meet Andrew and I
thought immediately that he was so cool and had this dynamite southern
accent. My instincts were right because even now, after all these years,
he's still cool. 
But the summer ended, I went to the beach a few last times to finish working on my tan preparing for the skin cancer that would come later. When
we were visiting my Aunt Del and Uncle Mel (that's Uncle Mel to the
right) up north with my mother, I happened to cross my legs and the skin
on my leg showed. Well, Uncle Mel's eyes bugged out like you see
sometimes in old cartoons. He asked, "Are you that dark all over??" He
was stunned. This was a man born and raised in Minnesota in the heart of
white-leg country. I think it had a profound impact on his whole
belief system.
By now, my brother Dave had already moved to the
Buffalo, New York area and was preparing for his marriage to the lovely
Miss Donna Krueger. So as I
prepared to leave to go off to boot camp, it never occurred to me that I
was leaving my parents with an empty nest. And while it's true that
they were never what you might call 'demonstrative' it may have at least
been nice if I had awakened long enough to recognize what was going on
around me and acknowledge it somehow. 'It never occurred to me' - a
phrase I often use even to this day. But I was excited because I was
taking my first jet aircraft trip. Bob and I were off to Chicago and on
to the Great Lakes Naval Training Center where I would be introduced to
'culture shock' before they had even invented the word.
How come I've never seen that picture of you before?
February 6, 2009 at 11:56 PM
Scary, huh!!?? Juuuust teasing. You went with that look again when we did our tour of the west!! And enhanced the look with a new cowboy hat!!
February 7, 2009 at 1:56 PM