My Redacted Life: Chapter 15 (Cont._3)

Monday came on a nice early May morning in 1972 and I had a problem. It may have been an opportunity more than a problem. Either way, I faced an obstacle. We needed an engineering tech at the office, and I had fallen heir to the assignment. I looked for several days and then quit.

I had found one. He was just what we needed. There was just this small matter. He was the Boss’s distant cousin. As such, he had been offered a job when the firm opened and had turned it down, fearing the risk of the unknown over a secure job with the state highway department.

Now the company had been around for a couple of years and the risk had diminished. The Boss’s ego hadn’t. It had grown, in fact. That evidenced itself when I told him that morning about my find, and about their relationship.

He didn’t express a great deal of enthusiasm, quite the contrary.

I relied on a tried and true management skill that I had been taught in the Navy’s advanced human relations training.

It’s called Class A Ass-kissing.

“Don’t you see, though,” I said, “how being under your guidance would train him to take risks and address challenges? I know it has me. The family would be thankful. I know I would, too.”

“He gave me one of those ‘don’t try to pull that crap with me’ looks and shrugged. “I don’t care,” he said. “He’ll be working for the engineer and not for me. Do what you want.” We went on to a different matter.

I called Ron McConnell and suggested that he might want to give notice. Building a good team isn’t hard. You just have to find individuals that fit, and who, at least in this case, knew a circle template from a T-square. That phone call was the basis of a friendship that has lasted through “many dangers, toils, and snares.” Funny how things work that way.

That evening, I came home from work to my new apartment, now furnished with cast-off items and a few new things. I even had a TV now. It was a primitive color set, loaned to me by my sister, bought years before after she had gotten a promotion, one of countless ones over the years that would land her at the top of both her profession and a high-rise office building. Have I mentioned that my sister is some sort of genius? "She got it all," Sainted Mother used to say.

My next-door neighbor was standing in her doorway as I approached. She was behind a screen door, but I could tell she was wearing naught but an unbottoned blouse and a pair of lacy panties. She asked if I had gotten moved in okay. Her name was Rita and she was an attractive and wonderful, though slightly eccentric person.

As I was trying to clear my head and decipher her question despite the obvious distraction, her sister Vernell, also a “looker” and nice person, walked up. She lived upstairs, sometimes alone and sometimes with a friend from college who taught school in a nearby town and who lived part-time with Vernell.

She took one look at her sister through the screen and said, “Didn’t quite finish dressing, did we?”

Rita looked down. “Oops,” she said, slamming the apartment door.”

Vernell turned to me. “Enjoying your new apartment and the neighbors, are we?”

I blushed. She laughed, winked, opened the door, and went inside Rita’s apartment. She left me there to wonder, not for the first time in my life and not the last, why people in my life invariably marched to the beat of drummers that only they heard. That was true.

It would only get truer.