As I approach retirement in a year or so, I’m overcome with intrusive thoughts as I inventory my accomplishments and failures. Questions like “what have I done with my life?” or “why the hell did I do that?” are dangling in my consciousness more than usual. It’s normal sentient-being stuff I suppose. I never had the impression that farm animals agonized over such things. One lucky benefit of being a bovine.

I find myself disappointed over not having chosen a career path that might have led to a more impactful life. The closest I got was as a chemistry prof helping students get through organic chemistry. It was very satisfying and I managed to meet many wonderful students and faculty. Chemical science has provided a comfortable and intellectually stimulating lifestyle. One negative I suppose is that a chemist isn’t much good without an institution from which to practice chemistry within. Outside of an organization with no lab and no free access to Chemical Abstracts, how is a person to remain connected to chemistry? I guess you just don’t. Some say that a I could be an adjunct prof somewhere. But that is just being a hired hand in a school too cheap to pay much. I wouldn’t be surprised if they picked up adjuncts at Home Depot early in the morning for day labor. The poor sods would load up in the back of an old Ford pickup and trundle off with their sack lunches.

One of my faults as a person is a deficiency in recreation and doing vacations. The fact is that I’m perfectly happy at home reading or watching YouTube videos on geology, writing this silly blog, war reporting on Ukraine or following Itchy Boots. The problem is that guys who don’t stay active during retirement tend to die soon thereafter. I’m not ready to croak just yet so I decided to stay on for another year.

My memory begins in the early 1960’s. One of my earliest memories is watching the funeral of JFK on black and white television. Up until age 14 most of my time was spent on a hog, corn and soybean farm in Iowa. I grew up very aware of the US space program on television and was captivated by it. My father was a private pilot/farmer so airplanes were in our lives. I recall him in his friend Daryl’s Stearman buzzing our farm. They would drop a roll of toilet paper producing a long streamer of paper sailing to the ground and then fly back to the airport. We would go to flight breakfasts at the local airport where we would feast on pancakes, sausage and scrambled eggs inside someone’s hanger. Afterwards they gave kids airplane rides for a penny a pound.

My family still used machines like the corn picker above when I was a kid. For a kid interested in space, these machines made fantastic spaceships of the imagination when sitting in the machine shed. Why didn’t I try to be an astronaut? I did, sort of. I got a pilots license then entered Air Force ROTC in college in 1980. Between nearsightedness and a superabundance of qualified candidates with perfect vision from the Air Force Academy down in the Springs, the odds looked poor. My civilian pilots license was sneered at and valued as less than nothing, but I could train to be the GIB- Guy In Back, handling weapons systems and electronic countermeasures. While blowing things up could be exciting, what do you do when you get out? Naah.

Instead they tried to funnel most of us off into some missile squadron up at F.E. Warren AFB in Cheyenne, WY. It is an honorable slot for many good Americans, just not me. I lived an hour from there and had no interest in southeastern Wyoming or the Dakotas. There would be long stretches underground with someone authorized to shoot you if they doubt your sanity. The whole point of missileer training was to get the launch orders confirmed and the bird launched before the silo got cratered when Soviet MIRVs came sailing in from over the north pole. You can drive by missile silos in northeastern Colorado. Just don’t linger at the fence or a USAF vehicle with armed military police will pull up with considerable urgency and ask just exactly WTF you are doing.

A civilian commercial airline flying career in the 1970’s was complicated by the number of retired Viet Nam pilots who dominated the flying slots at the airlines, or so I was told. They had turbine engine time in complex, very fast aircraft and I had time with a 100 hp Lycoming horizontally opposed 4-cylinder engine poking holes in the sky at 95 knots. I was overly concerned about this I think.

Anyway, organic chemistry captured my fancy and I went for it. This was a constructive career whereas blowing things up was destructive. I chose the former.