Time Passages

It was twenty-six years ago this past Tuesday I worked my last day as an employee of the US Air Force (civilian type) in Europe. I tell myself I still haven't decided if I'm angry or sad about how the end happened and why, but I lie. That I still mark the anniversary should tell me what I don't want to know.

I didn't lose my job, it sort of lost me. Historically, in less time than it takes to explain the appeal of totalitarianism to Eastern Europeans, that appeal evaporated into thin air and where there had been two Germanys for four and a half decades, there was suddenly only one. 

As a card carrying grey eminence of the NATO occupation forces, and with Exchange and Commissary privileges to prove it (not forgetting my Mainz-Kastel Audio -Video Club Frequent Shopper Membership), I was part of the 'everything must go!' overhead the United States Armed Forces parted with in their Getting Out of Europe sale. 

In dribs and drabs over the course of a couple of years, many of those with whom I had worked, in and out of uniform, found themselves in the same place and space-where the road and the sky collide with very little time to think once much less twice.

I was considering all of that (and the role a pair of talentless right bastard career Air Force officers both of them, Captain Mary and Colonel Tom, played in engineering my exit) while watching the images of the President speaking to the United Nations and the now united Germany's ambassador to the UN trying to sort out, as are so many others around the globe, exactly whom it is some of us elected to be President. 

Western Europe which Amercian armed forces saved twice in the last century is doing just fine without us, it seems to me, as both we and they struggle to maintain both our equilibrium in a slippery slope of a new world order as well as the candow, courage and communications that marked so many decades of our relationships with one another.

It amazes and heartens me to watch from a distance. If I'd known then what would happen to my life now and that of my family, I don't think I'd have changed a thing for my family or the world in whcih we lived, despite or because of that knowledge. We are the sum of everyone we've ever known and the journey so far has been as educational as it has been inspirational and entertaining. 

Sometimes this story each of us is writing can be a bit tricky as farewell often becomes goodbye and at other times, it's yet another hello.
-bill kenny