This Week's Very Short Story: Chapter 12
I got married in 1977 and it wasn’t until 2 years later
that we went on a honeymoon, unless you call driving across the country and
moving to San Francisco as one.
The night before we got married, we sneaked out and saw
the Star Wars, on our 3rd anniversary we went to The Empire Strikes
Back and on our 6th anniversary we went to Return of the Jedi. By my calculations there should be 12 Star
Wars’ movies and they are working on the thirteenth.
I was talking to my wife awhile back and she said that
she talked to our eldest son and that he had a job interview that day and one the
next day. I said I guess that he has a
black suit for that.
On a trip to Chicago for an interview to podiatry school,
I came by a backgammon store. On the way
back after the interview, I went back to the store and bought my girlfriend a
backgammon set. Little did she know that
I was planning on getting it back. After
an accepted proposal, today I still have the backgammon set and the same
girlfriend.
For the most part, I do not gamble. I used to say that the only money that I
would lose in Las Vegas were the coins that I would put in the pay phone to
call home when I was away at a seminar. Now there are cell phones.
We once went to Las Vegas with friends and my
in-laws. The only thing that we lost was
my mother in-law in Caesars’ Palace. We
searched for a long time and we did not find her. She had gone back to the hotel where we were
staying without telling anyone. Not to
say that my father in-law was upset, but we did not see him until the next day
as we were going down for breakfast and he was leaving the casino after a night
of card play and heading to his room to sleep.
I have told you that I am ambidextrous. What I did not tell you is whether I could
do anything well with either hand.
When I was a kid in Oak Park Michigan, I loved to fly
kites. I would start with a paper kite,
add a tail and off I would go. We would
run and run, just trying to catch a little wind to get it up in the air. When I had children, we would take them out
to Santa Barbara California to fly kites.
All I had to do was put the kite together, sit down and let the kite go
straight up.
People ask me if any of my children went into
medicine. The simple answer is no. The long answer is that I did not want to do
what my father did either. He was an
engineer. When I was young, I remember
my father being laid off every so many years. I did not understand this. He worked for Ford, Chrysler, Ling-Temco-Vought
(LTV) and at the U.S. Army Tank-automotive and Armaments Command (TACOM) in
Warren Michigan to end his career. It
turns out that engineers would lose their jobs when government contracts changed. I just did not like that idea. As for my children and their reason why they
choose something else, you would have to ask them.
