Another night of retro dreams

My best friend's mother has died of the same blood-flooding-the-brain event.  So similar to what my Aunt Jean experienced when she died in 2017.  They were both 93.  Also found face-down on the bathroom floor, each was effectively dead before her body struck the floor.  Jean was found after she had fully died.  My friend's mom was taken to the hospital, brain dead, but kept breathing by a tube until her daughter could join her two brothers and, essentially, pull the plug with all of them present.

For Mike and me, all of the aunts and uncles and grandparents and parents are now gone.  That era has come to a final close.  For us now, we and our few siblings, no matter how many years that may take, are next in line.

I was reminded of this sort of thing when an offensive lineman for the undefeated Miami Dolphins of 1972, Bob Kuechenberg, died the other day at age 71.  I saw that team live in the LA Coliseum for Super Bowl VII in 1973 (back when a normal person could acquire--and afford--a Super Bowl ticket).  Privately, those football players may notice as the years pass that more and more of their teammates have died.  Eventually, the number of players on that team who are still alive are outnumbered by those who have passed.  In time, all will have passed.

The dream I had was finding a well-worn Christmas wreath from decorations used in the Kaman plant where I worked from the Spring of 1980 through mid-1988, when I lived in Colorado Springs after I was forced to resign from the Air Force in 1979.

I wake up from such dreams and my mind slips me back to those years of the 1980's when I wondered if I would ever get my life back into some kind of order, some kind of harmony, after the disruption of losing one's first, best career.  Those years were ones of recovery not renewal. I didn't have a purpose.  I didn't have a permanent place.  The world I tried to create felt unfulfilled.

I used to write that I had finally gotten an invitation to the party (being out and gay), only to find that the party was over before any of us realized (AIDS).  The newspaper articles began to detail the crisis.  The TIME magazine cover article summarized what was known.  The movies:  PARTING GLANCES, LONGTIME COMPANION, gave faces to the disease.  Randy Shilts's book culminated in an attempt to make it all history.  (I remember a few of us joking that it was the popcorn at The Foxhole bar.  Some suspected but nobody knew for sure how the disease might be transmitted.)

I spent those eight transition years working for two different groups at Kaman Corporation on Garden of the Gods Road in Colorado Springs.  First, it was the Displacement Measuring Devices group (where I worked with Shirley Overholser, Rich Hostak, Greg--whose last name escapes me--and the much older inventor of the device that they built and tested and I wrote about, whose entire name I cannot now recall) and then the Radiation Monitoring Group.  For that second team, I had many coworkers with whom I worked tangentially.  I had my solo office in the basement with no one else in that enclosed space but me.  When I had little technical writing to do, or parts to order (I was also given the supply job, to order those parts used to make the radiation detection skids that went into nuclear power plants), I read books to assist my teaching college classes in the evenings at the military bases around Colorado Springs for Pikes Peak Community College, at Fort Carson and Peterson Air Force Base.

At Kaman, we got the Christmas week off each year.  So while the pay was generally low--hence my continuing to teach sometimes five nights a week and all day Saturday--that week off between Christmas and New Year's was a treat.  And then it all came to an end when the Radiation Monitoring division was sold to a private investor.  I worked for that company for a few months before they packed up and were moving to South Carolina, where the new owner was from.  I didn't go but instead enrolled in a teacher's certification program at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs (UCCS).  I visited the campus one fine afternoon, contemplating what I ought to do.  The next morning, my horoscope in the local Gazette Telegraph newspaper read, "You should consider going back to school to get your teaching credential."  Signs from the universe rarely get that specific.

I spent the next 14 months attending classes and acquiring that credential.  After graduation, I went on at least three interviews at middle and high schools in the area, the most significant one being Air Academy High School, almost right back where I had been jettisoned 10 years earlier, teaching some of the same students that I had taught at the nearby middle school.  It was a natural and fitting transition.

But I wasn't hired.

I still believe that it was because the head of the English Department at the high school was male; but all of the other English teachers were female.   I think he vetoed me (and I also heard from someone I knew in that department who confirmed my judgment).

I finally got a job the next year on a technical writing project for Capitol Federal Savings and Loan in the Tech Center of Denver, making more money per hour than I had ever made at Kaman.  I still taught my evening classes in Colorado Springs, forced to drive from the south of Denver to the south of Colorado Springs at Fort Carson.  I kept my house, but no full-time job came through as the Cap Fed job folded in June of 1990, after I had started in March of that year.  (I had gotten that windfall job because my former roomie, Dino, was entering a building in Denver as a former co-renter of an old house cut into tiny apartments in Denver was exiting.  Don and Dino chatted for a time, and Dino informed him that he knew a technical writer in need of a job.  Don had just been hired for a technical writing project, a job that required more writers.)

In the early Spring of 1991, as I was still looking for a job, a woman with whom I had worked at Cap Fed, got a job at IBM.  They also needed more writers on that project, and she contacted me.  (As most contractors know, if you place a fellow worker in a project for your contracting firm, you get a $1,000 or more bonus if they remain on the job for a specific length of time.)  Nancy got the bonus and she and I remained on the Joint Application Development (JAD) project for slightly more than a year.  We got moved over to the Federal Systems Division for a few months after the JAD project ended.  I also continued to teach at Fort Carson two nights a week while I rented out my house in Colorado Springs to a friend and his partner while I continued to live in an apartment complex in Denver.

While working at those two projects for IBM, I also applied for a full-time English teaching job at Denver Community College.  I ought to have been a natural fit, having taught for Pikes Peak Community College for more than a decade, as well as at the Air Force Academy.  Somewhere between 15-20 of us sat in a classroom waiting to hear from the head of the department.  Most of those sitting around me were younger women.  The head of the department was a man.  We were told that five of us would be selected as finalists to be evaluated in a mock classroom situation.  I was not even selected as a finalist.

Eventually, even the Federal Systems project ended and I was out of work once more.  During those 4-5 weeks of unemployment, two job prospects appeared that would have rerouted my life in an almost full circle.

The first would have taken me back to Colorado Springs and Garden of the Gods Road.  Hewlett Packard, just across a large field and down the block from Kaman, needed a tech writer.  I interviewed.  My only competition was a younger woman (just like the first time I interviewed at Kaman and was not hired) who was also not a veteran and was far less experienced as a technical writer than I.

But I was not hired.

I could have moved back into my house at 6555 Palmer Park Blvd. and returned to living the life I had lived while working at Kaman.  But that was not to be.

The second--even more significant job prospect--I read about on the wall of the unemployment office in Denver.  The Air Force Academy was being mandated to hire a certain number of civilian instructors.  The English Department was going to hire one civilian instructor.  I ought to have been a natural fit, having taught at the Air Force Academy in the English Department, as well as my Pikes Peak Community College experience, in addition to more than a decade as a technical writer, and a former Air Force officer.  A Master's Degree was all that was required.  I learned that just over 100 people applied.

I was not selected.

Even during the 1980's, Mike kept telling me that California was building more community colleges, they needed experienced teachers, and that I should apply so I could move back to that state where I had left for good in 1973.  I resisted because I loved Colorado, I had my house in the Springs, and I did not want to return at that point.

Eventually, after that five-week break of unemployment, I heard once more from Nancy that she had gotten hired again at IBM, this time by the Sales Manual team and they needed more technical writers.  I was hired.  She got another bonus check.  Nearly 28 years later, I am still at that job.  But there are a couple of caveats:

Had I gotten hired full-time by Pikes Peak College, I would have been able to retire a few years ago with a full retirement of working over 25 years (just before I left Colorado Springs, I was in the running for a full-time job in the English Department; but the department rigged the requirements so that I came in second--this time the faculty was all female and the one who met the criteria they applied was also female; and they knew her because she had taught part-time at the main campus while I was next door at the Fort--they did not bother to get to know me.  They also did not take into consideration that I had taught many more courses in English, communications, history, humanities and Literature for PPCC, nor did they consider that I had taught 9 English classes at the Air Force Academy and another for Chapman College.  The woman I was competing against had taught a couple more English classes for PPCC at the main campus; and that was how they selected her and not me.  A rigged criteria if ever I saw one.)

Had I gotten hired full-time by Denver Community College, the same comfortable retirement could have occurred after 25 years of teaching there.  As it is, I only have social security to live on were my IBM job to finally end.

But had my path not diverged in the woods, I would not have been able to violate "Mona's law":  "In one of Armistead Maupin's Tales in the City books, Mona expounds Mona's Law, 'You can have a hot lover, a hot job and a hot apartment, but you can't have all three at the same time....'"  (I would also add hot car to Mona's list.)

Regardless of how, at the time, I wanted to teach back at the Academy, or at PPCC, or DCC, that's not what happened.  Regardless of the sexism (both male and female) over the years that likely contributed to my not staying in Colorado Springs or returning to Colorado Springs, I now have a great house, a nice job, a hot lover, and a nice car.  And I am out of the snow and cold of Colorado.  

Regardless of what we think we want through the years, Fate (or whatever you want to call it) often knows best.