PostPoems Be Artistic. Be Creative. Be Inspired!

On Saturday, June 7th of that year, I had graduated from college with a History major, and the designator "distinction" on my diploma (meaning I had passed my oral exam at the highest level that my department assessed; two of the ten of us Senior majors achieved distinction, both of us having been considered by our peers, prior to the exams, as being unable to achieve this level.

On June 9th, my companion and I traveled by car to a small village in Northern Ohio where those whom I believed would become my in-laws in 1982 resided.  On Monday, June 16th, we returned to my parents' residence.  My companion would, in about a week, move on to a local campus to begin the Junior undergrad year.  I was waiting for a decision as to acceptance in the U. S. Air Force, a decision I had made hastily and on poor advice.

On my birthday evening, we went out for dine-in pizza and salad bar (much like in the summer of 1976, with Cerulean), and then went to one of our vicnity's finest indoor cinema's to view Urban Cowboy.  This film, like Saturday Night Fever, would soon be associated, in my mind, with great failure and disappointment---not because of any fault or flaw in those films (I had loved, and still love, them both), but due to my own faults and flaws.  To this day, the musical sound tracks from these films stir up an emotional response in me.

For the second time in my life, my birthday seemed to be a portent that something was ending, not beginning.  This had happened in 1976 (the 17th was then a Thursday) when I faced the prospect of no longer seeing my High School mentor daily, as well as not seeing Cerulean for eleven weeks or so after September 9th.

On my birthday in 1980, I struggled, while eating pizza and then watching Urban Cowboy, to suppress the feeling of dread that was starting to haunt me.  (Again I can feel it, as I listen to some of the music from that film while writing this.)  I did not know that the worse period of my life---from October 2nd, when I left for Lackland AFB, and continuing until the end of December, 1983---was soon to begin.  I knew, from my parents' expressed disappointments on the very day of my graduation, that my four year degree, in History, was considered, by them, to be a crushing failure; and that the romantic relationship that I was then in was also heavily and consistently disapproved by them.  They would rejoice when it ended, with a long distance phone call, on Thursday, October 30th, of 1980.  My life was about to experience several tremendous failures---including early discharge from the USAF when they were unable to offer me the position promised me by the recruiter, a condition for voluntary Honorable Discharge under the contract then required, by President Carter, to be offered to college graduates who enlisted in Officer Training.  The recruiter, who had been a friend of my mother's during her tenure as Admissions Clerk of the local County Juvenile Court (weekly, the recruiter came to my mother's office to collect the files of those juveniles sentenced to military enlistment rather than jail time).  He had told me to imagine the twelve weeks of OTS as twelve versions of college finals week.  This made sense:  I had just graduated after four years of study, which included three terms per year, and one finals week for each term.  I can tell you, this very day, that on my first day of OTS, when we were wakened at 4am by blaring march music after having arrived there at midnight the previous evening (and the same wake-up time assaulted us every day that I was there), I knew it did not have one damned thing in common with my undergrad experience . . . because, at college, I never got up before 7am, at the very (and exceptional) earliest, and never before 10am on most days.  When, at the end of October, 1980, I initiated the discharge (which was, indeed, Honorable, and carried the discharge rank of Tech Sargeant), the recruiter apparently lost the bonus he had earned for signing me.  It came out of his next paycheck, and he never spoke again socially to my mother for the remainder of her career with the juvenile court.  I read, just weeks ago, that he recently passed away.  He had let my mother know, also, that I was not welcome to stop by the recruitment office subsequent to my discharge.

But what was worse was to be told, by my then fiancee over a long distance phone call that lasted, maybe, ten minutes, not to visit, or stop by, or communicate any further once I had returned from Lackland.

In the following summer, I was offered acceptance at a local University to the graduate (Masters' degree) program in Ancient History.  Although I lacked a working knowledge of both Greek and Latin (because my alma mater had cut these programs from the curriculum before I had had any chance to take the courses), this lack on my part was waived.  However, because of my parents' modest financial success, I was disqualified from scholarships.  My parents considered the pursuit of a Masters' Degree in Ancient History to be too expensive and too frivolous, so they flatly refused to provide any assistance, and I had to send a written decline to that University.  I refused to forgive my parents for this until about 2007.  

All of this was ahead of me as I sat in that theater on June 17th of 1980.  As for my ambition to Poetry, I, at that time, despised rhyme, metrical lines, and metaphors and similes.  My promise to a former beloved to write some original contribution to the ongoing field of historical study of the serial murderer known to History as Jack the Ripper was, as yet, unfulfilled (that fulfillment happened in December, 2000).  (Spoiler alert:  if the five anomalies present in the circumstances of the fifth and last Ripper murder---the attack upon call-girl Mary Kelly---are gathered into a unified field, such as Einstein sought for to explain the four cosmic forces, the only solution is that Mary Kelly survived the attack by murdering the Ripper, who, in this theory, must be female, and leaving the mutilated corpse in her bed at 13 Miller Court in Whitechapel, London.)   I knew what the "Q" Gospel document was believed to be, but did not yet have sufficient logic with which to challenge America's foremost theological expert on Q whose blatant violation of the principle of Occam's Razor (the useless piling up of assumptions in a theory) had never been pointed out to him (I attempted that in 2008).  (Spoiler alert:  Q is most likely a real source, but, in my theory, it is preaching notes compiled by the Seventy whom Jesus sent ahead of Himself as attested to by the Evangelist Saint Luke in the tenth chapter of his Gospel.  This requires one assumption---that they preached from a set of notes compiled by them, or someone else, from Jesus' teachings to which they had listened---which is a more parsimonius compliance to the principles of Occam's Razor.)

   All this was ahead of me, including the storms of failure, postponement, and procrastination.  I did not know, on my birthday in 1980, what my immediate future would become.  But also, I did not know that, also ahead of me, was a long corporate career in banking, the birth of my daughter of whom I am so very proud, and the beginnings, in 1994, of Poetry, actual, viable, publishable Poetry . . . that rhymed.  These, too, were ahead of me.  But all I knew was the dread of the obstacles which, though still undefined that summer, were waiting to block me.