Probably Should Skip This Date Entirely

I was on my way to one thing today as I started to write this, and then got sidetracked to an entirely different thing. Sort of how life imitates art. 
Or how Art (Carney) used to eat Life (Cereal) when Mikie wouldn't.
I could be misremembering that.

What I'm not misremembering was forty-one years ago today at a little after half past nine in the morning in the administration office of the 435th Tactical Airlift Wing (TAW), I signed on the line and turned in my green Armed Forces Identification Card and became a private citizen again, ending my association as an active-duty member of the United States Air Force. 

It was a Friday and I would begin the next chapter in my life the following Monday returning to my previous assignment, now as a civilian employee, for considerably MORE money than as a GI (so much more I wondered what took me so long to cross over to the shirt and sweater brigade). 

In the eight years that followed, I was to work in four different organizations before, in an irony that proves God has a sense of humor and I am Their punchline, also on this date I was in a very different office of the same admin section picking "Grow-ton, Connecticut" as where I and my family would be living as my employment disappeared from Germany and with it my lifestyle and that of my wife and children. 

I had been notified in March I was part of the NATO Surplus to Requirements Overhead and would be reassigned, ready or not. At first, it had looked like we were going to Winchester, Virginia, somewhere in the Shenandoah Valley to do who knows what with who knows who but that fell through. 

And then up popped a job in Grow-ton as I was told it was pronounced. In Connecticut. Only a few hours from where my brothers and sisters and others related to one or the other or both lived. Not that I was keen about telling them I was coming nor would they have been especially overjoyed to learn of their pending good fortune.

We each have lived lives of quiet desperation, and, more often, perspiration. My arrival with two children under double digits who spoke no English would have been interesting but not earth-shattering for any of us. 

In retrospect, in the last three-plus decades the person who has failed to immerse and then emerge has been me, more often than not. I'd say 'Color me surprised,' but I'm not.

-bill kenny