Something about reaching the age of 60 has made me reflect all over again about the path that my life has taken since I was forced to resign from the Air Force and teaching at the Academy in Colorado Springs.
If my life's journey were a stream, I feel as if I have gotten caught in one of those edges of the stream where the water flows in a circle, off from the main current. It essentially stagnates. Perhaps it is merely gathering strength before moving onward or forward. Or perhaps this is merely a pause in the continued and downward path to mortality.
Sadly, though not morosely, this is a time of one's life when a person realizes how many of one's contemporaries are gone or going fast. Many of those icons, or simply those whom one remembers from before, TV and film stars and personalities, wind up in the obituaries. And you realize that many of them are not much older than you are, especially when only a decade or two separates you from the age that they are when they die.
This is also a time in which one realizes one's mistakes from the past that have severely impacted where one is right now. Frankly, this is not where I thought I would be. Or, rather, and more specifically, this is not where I intended or hoped to be.
I have a job but, working for IBM as a consultant, it's not all that secure, and certainly not for the next decade, especially when I have worked there for the past two decades, since 1991. Unfortunately, I am one of those who did not plan for his retirement. I used the retirement money I'd earned from teaching part time from 1980 until 1991, to publish volumes two and three of Rainbow Arc of Fire back in the late 1990's. Any number of financial advisors would have told me that $17,000 of teacher-retirement pay should not have been touched, and certainly not have been used to pay for self-publishing two more volumes of a series that had not showed the first volume to have any legs.
I was still in my 40's at the time I used those funds; and 60 years old seemed far away, and retirement at 65 or 67 or 70 a long, long way off. But now retirement is less than five, seven or, more likely, ten years away.
Besides the fact that my pay was cut by 20 percent over a year ago, on January 1st 2009, and won't be restored any time soon, and that my job is not at all secure, my medical benefits have also been eroded over the past several years. What's left would not cover any kind of significant injury or illness. So, while in the early 2000's, I might have felt a bit more secure regarding my overall financial situation, now it's gotten much more unstable and likely to get even worse. (I know many people are in worse shape than I right now.)
Where did I go wrong besides spending my retirement pay foolishly and prematurely on my books? And where did I imagine myself, ideally, at this time in my life?
Teaching, actually.
I had always imagined myself as a teacher. When Spock tells Kirk in Star Trek II that being a Starship captain was his first, best destiny, I knew whereof he spoke. Teaching was my first, best destiny. At the Academy in the beginning, of course. Then in evening classes for Pikes Peak Community College in Colorado Springs. After nearly nine years of teaching part time, the college had an opening in the English Department. But I came in second. They hired a woman whom they knew better. She had been teaching part time on the main campus while I had been teaching at Fort Carson and Peterson Air Force Base. Frankly, and not at all bitterly from my perspective, they'd rigged the selection criteria so that she would get the job. I was told that she had taught a few more English classes than I had, so she was hired instead of me.
What they failed to take into account were the nine English classes I had taught full time at the Air Force Academy from 1978-9. What they also refused to count were the dozens of humanities and communications and history classes I has also taught for Pikes Peak College at Fort Carson and Peterson Air Force Base in the previous few years.
As I said, they'd rigged the selection criteria so that she would be hired instead. I still have no problem with their hiring her and not me. As I said, they knew her (they never came over to Fort Carson to see me teach, BTW), they must have liked her and favored her, and they clearly wanted to hire her as a permanent colleague. My only problem was that their selection criteria was so obviously rigged as to be rather silly. Had they come to me and told me that they wanted to hire her instead, regardless of the reason, I would have had no issue with that decision.
The problem was that by not hiring me--and the fact that there were no other openings in any other department at Pike Peak Community College while I lived and worked in Colorado Springs from 1980 until 1991--I had no other choice but to move to Denver when the IBM job was offered to me. My further mistake was not to realize that the teaching situation at Pikes Peak would not always remain so static. After I had moved, the population of the region almost doubled over the rest of the decade. I didn't realize that the college itself grew substantially. They even opened a northern campus not far from the Air Force Academy, just across the freeway.
Had I paid attention to what was happening, had I not become so wrapped up with writing and then publishing Rainbow Arc of Fire, I would have been aware that there were likely several openings in all academic departments for which I might have been considered and hired, given all those years of teaching so many classes for the college.
I would have had a permanent teaching position with a much more stable salary and benefits. I would not have had all of these regrets anyway.
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