Ya’ll know I can bore you to death with my “connect the
dots” babblings, but here goes: the Houston Flood, James Joyce, and my naval
career. I’ll try to explain.
See, I was happy as a clam living in San Francisco and
working a job in the Mission District. I was there one day, not bothering a
soul as Sainted Mother used to say. A few days later I was on my way to Navy
Boot Camp, the military draft having caught up with me and I having opted for
sea life rather than Vietnam life. Months later I was in that very war zone. Don’t
ask. The point is, our lives can change very quickly and we’d best, as I
learned back then, not allow our happiness to be determined solely where we
live and what we are doing.
No one on Earth, as far as I know, lives a life of guaranteed
continuity. I know I had to learn to adjust, or perish from misery. From a life
of fun, and so-called “friends,” I suddenly transitioned to a place where my
friends were ashamed of me and the only ones who truly cared about me were
thousands of miles away, soon to be halfway around the world, from me. I can’t
begin to tell you how lonesome a person in such a state feels when he hears Taps played over a Navy base shutting down
for the day. That's when a totally dark silence descends upon his world. I was so low then that I could have walked
under a snake’s belly wearing a stovepipe hat.
I was in Monterey, California waiting to transfer to a naval
security detachment in Da Nang. One night, I had 25 cents, a quarter, to my
name. I could go to a base movie for the quarter, or buy a package of cigarettes
with it. I opted for the cigarettes and then went to a little library they had
on base. Oddly, they had a copy of Ulysses,
by James Joyce. Over a number of evenings, I read about the wanderings of Leopold
Bloom as described by Joyce, and it gave me an idea.
Given a day off, I rose early and went wandering. I walked
to Fisherman’s Wharf, then to Alvarado Street, through Cannery Row, past the
shipyard and around to the Great Tide Pool. There, I sat on a rock where I
contemplated my situation and my choices. I had made a mistake, I thought, and
I still had more than three years left to live with it. That didn’t shape up as
a happy future.
I had choices. I could to something truly dishonorable and live
with the consequences. I could spend the next three-an-a-half years wallowing in
abject pity and anger. I could accommodate fate and seek the best it had to
offer, however meager the offerings.
I chose the last option, sitting there where, as Gary Toler
once said, “… the wide old Pacific comes a’pounding on the shore.” The waves
forming my life were pounding now, but there was a wide sea beyond them, and I
chose to wander it with acceptance in my heart.
Know what? Life didn’t
turn out as badly as I had imagined. I learned what I consider to be one of
life’s great lessons: be happy as possible, no matter where you are. Always
seek to find happiness in “the now” instead of in some distant dream. As Victor
Frankl observed in his classic Man’s
Search for Meaning, even in Nazi death camps, those with the best chance
for survival were the ones who could, in some of the most inhumane conditions
ever devised by humankind, enjoy, for a brief moment, the beauty of a sunset.
For a short story inspired by my wanderings that day, click here. It's the one called Of Times and Tides. Thanks.
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| "Fearsome Four-Eyes" ready for whatever. |
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