Bullet holes in my windshield
My parents were poor, we didn't own a farm,
just a house and ten acres with woods. I
knew my parents couldn't afford college and frankly, the idea of four more
years in a learning institution just didn't hold any appeal for me. Too boring.
I was much more
interested in cars than I was in sports or books in those days. But in Indiana, sports, college and farming were everything, especially in high school, so that pretty much left me out of the
‘cool’ loop. I had great grades until I reached high school and
decided I'd rather be doing something more in life. The something more didn't include hitting the books.
Besides, I thought the
guys who liked cars were much cooler anyway than the sports jocks or pencil heads, which is what we called the academic kids.
I could relate to cars. Cars were
something tangible, steel and chrome you could touch and work on. I was able to see and feel the satisfaction
of a job well done when I worked on a car that didn't run. Maybe there were no trophies involved, or a
sweater with a letter on it, but there was a feeling of deep accomplishment
from fixing and customizing a beautiful car.
In the 1960's, cars were everything too.
Everybody wanted to be seen in a hot car, even farm boys, jocks, scholars and yes,
girls too. Especially girls.
The part time job I had
recently landed as a bag boy at the local Kroger’s grocery store gave me a
small taste of the adult world. In summer, weekends and holidays off, while
those other kids were hanging out at
drive-ins trying to pick up girls, I was helping little old ladies with
groceries to their cars to earn spending money. But even that bit of responsibility was not
enough for a boy in a hurry to grow up, the small responsibility of that job only
made me hungry to experience more of what the world had to offer.
The bar scene in Vietnam, a big part of our lives while there
I felt like most of the crap they were
teaching in school was junk I’d likely never be using in real life anyway. I fancied myself as thinking much older than my high school
peers. Maybe I was not older in years, but in my
mindset. Just about everything they
thought was important, I only saw as insignificant. I already knew that what was important in
high school, would matter very little in the real world.
When young, I had no idea this would become so important to me.
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