life as a meander

Man plans and the gods laugh. Greek proverb.

I think of my life as a meander. Like any good former engineer, I have sometimes planned and more often had good intentions, but life never followed those. Life went its own way, seldom running straight for long before darting left or right.

I mean, I was born in Albuquerque and two an a half years later was toddling in Recife, Pernambuco, Brasil. My folks may not have been dirt poor, maybe dust poor, but that just didn't happen to an American couple who was dust poor. No, My father and mother had to volunteer and the Southern Baptist Convention's Foreign Missions Board had to select them, train them, and send them to Recife. There they learned that what they had been taught was the Brasilian language, a version of Portuguese but with softer consonants and more music, was actually only a Texan approximation. I think my father first tried to correct the native speakers to use the SBC FMB version of their language. But he was smarter than that and soon learned the Brazilian way of speaking, mostly. I don't think he ever got the music right and some vocabulary baffled him. I remember cringing once, listening to him preach about the eggs of wrath. My mother despaired and did the best she could with what she had.

But I digress. Back to the meander.

I was born in Albuquerque, and before I could really learn American or toddling, I moved to Recife and then to Campina Grande.

Suddenly we went back to the United States but to Baton Rouge. That is, my mother and the kids did. My father went back to Fort Worth to complete his Master's degree in Theology, whatever that means, at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. I went to first grade in Baton Rouge where I learned a lifelong distrust of what Americans call education. For no reason I understood, they made me repeat what I'd already learned in Calvert Courses at four when I learned to read and started to read real books about King Arthur and Hopalong Cassidy. Nope, I was back to "Run, Dick, run." Whee.

Just to double the misery, we did it again at the beginning of second grade. Fortunately, again for no reason I understood, we moved back to Recife. That time we stayed in Recife, where at least I never had to face "Run, Dick, run" again. Geeminey!

And then once again for no reason I understood, we flew to Miami where my family split up. My two little brothers went to Stamford, Texas. My sister and I went to St. Louis. My father disappeared, and my mother went to an asylum.

She had caught my father cheating on her with another missionary in Recife, protested it, and so she was committed while he went off for some time without family responsibilities. That was America in those days.

My little sister and I lasted a few months in St. Louis and went to Perryton, Texas. We were there for a while, longer than we'd stayed in St. Louis, and then one day my father and the woman the asylum sent back showed up. She had had an unbelievable number of electrical shock treatments to her brain to convince her to be a demure and obedient housewife. That was America in those days. She was not my mother but she was a reasonable substitute.

These two strangers drove my sister and me to Stamford where we picked up my little brothers, who thought we had resurrected from the dead. The six of us then drove to Clovis, New Mexico, where we kids were told we were home. Hunh!

We stayed there for two and a half years, I think, then moved to Albuquerque where we stayed long enough for me to finish junior high school and high school.

I then moved to Los Cruces, New Mexico, where I participated in a wonderful program that let me take classes at New Mexico State University for six months and work at White Sands Missile Range as a technician's apprentice for six months. The deal was that I would study engineering. When I changed my major to Physics, I had to find new employment. Luckily for me, the NMSU Physical Sciences Lab snapped me up as a technician's assistant. It was cool! We got to actually do science!

Then I graduated and went to work for the Boeing Company in Seattle where I soon found myself at work in the unmanned exploration of space and splitting my time between Seattle and Los Angeles.

When that job ended, I went back to Seattle long enough to pack and move to Houston, where I worked for a year - well, I did something for a year. It was a crazy year.

So I quit and went back to Las Cruces for some graduate work in Physics. We (my wife, my three kids and I) were there five years or so, then I accepted a job with the Martin Marietta company and was back at the unmanned exploration of space but on the outskirts of Denver.

More or less naturally, that led to a job in Los Angeles where I've been ever since.

I think it's fair to call that a meander.

Oops! I fibbed! There's more to the meander: more meander.

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