Life is an adventure

Life in the Navy was an adventure… during my career it seemed that time just moved so slowly, but after 20 years it didn’t seem that bad, but what has really whizzed by since then has been the last 22 years since I retired from the Navy.

I think that everybody complains about some of the duty stations they’ve been assigned to and then can’t wait to get orders to another assignment. But, when the transfer is completed, they wind up missing the duty station that they just left. I found out that regardless of the duty station, whether it’s a great place or crappy one, when you leave it you’re going to miss it. 

What I discovered that when I returned to a crappy place that I thought I missed… it was still a crappy place, and it wasn’t the place that I missed, it was the people that I knew at that duty station that I missed. I discovered that a place does not make a community, people make up the community.

I spent 20 years pretty much being homesick for the community where I grew up. When I retired and moved back to that community I discovered that I had very little in common with anyone in the old neighborhood. My childhood friends moved on in their lives with family and new interests, just as I had.  I then realized that I became homesick for the Navy.

Fortunately, I was able to get a good job back in a military town… Twentynine Palms, Calif. When I moved here it felt like I had come back home. My neighbors were either retired military like myself, or they were active duty, or they worked at the base. There is nothing like the camaraderie you have with your co-workers, and in a military town your neighbors.

I see young people coming out here to the desert for duty, and if they don’t have a family or a car there isn’t much for them to do except hike in the desert… which they probably do as part of their training at the base. Many of them try to stay fit so they run, play sports and run some more. If they have a young wife, they might get involved with other young couples. One night my wife and I went to the drive-in to see a movie here in our town, which is probably only one of a very few drive-ins left in the United States.  We saw young couples and young families arriving before dark to get set up for the movie. They had brought their pot luck dinners to share with each other and later to enjoy the movie together… as a community. That took me back to when my family and I would get together with our friends at those crappy duty stations… we might have a potluck dinner then play board games or cards because the duty station didn’t have English language TV. Or we might all get together to go camping somewhere.  One time we even caravanned up through Italy and camped on the side of the road at night. We got to share a great adventure by visiting Taormina, at the Messina Straight, Pompeii, Naples and Rome all during a four day road trip.

Out here in Twentynine Palms you can pretty much tell where a retired Marine lives… if they don’t have the National Flag and the Marine Corps Flag flying on a pole in their yard, you just have to look at their garage… if the door is open to tell that they were a Marine… a place for everything ship-shaped and squared away. On the other hand if your children followed you out to the desert to live near Mom and Dad, then they need someplace to store all of their stuff… so in my garage, there isn’t any space to put anything else… I have to carry my golf clubs around in my truck because they won’t fit in my garage.  My wife and I are now way to old to try and ride a bicycle… yet we have a half a dozen of them stored in our garage. When our kids moved out we made them take their beds with them… but now they are stored in our garage.

My Grandfather was a Marine for maybe two years, but the discipline he obtain in the Marine Corps stayed with him for his entire life. His garage was always squared away. Oil was not allowed to drip from any ones cars who dared park in his drive way.  Weeds were not allowed to grow in his lawn or around his prize roses.

When grandpa was working, his shoes were always spit shined and his suits neatly pressed and his tie tied with a double Windsor. Come to think about it, after he retired his gardening clothes had to also be pressed, and his work shoes shined.

Life in the Navy can be measured in duty stations… during this time we were here… then this other time we were over there.  We think that we missed the disco 70’s altogether because we spent most of that time overseas somewhere or moving to or from a military base in the states.

There were, movies and TV shows that came and went that I am just now discovering in the discount video bins at my local super duper discount stores.  Some of the fashions that were around in the 70’s also seemed to come from the clown acts of the circus… Big shoes, Neon suits and Big Hats…  We did witness a streaker at a ball game on the base in Sicily in the early 70’s… the guy didn’t run very far until he was apprehended by the base security officers.

Our two sons had no idea what TV was until they were nearly 3 and 4 years old. We arrived at my parent’s house after being picked up from the airport following a trip half way around the globe. The TV was tuned to some program about cave men fighting dinosaurs. Our oldest son became very upset that those cavemen were going to hurt the dinosaurs.

Back in California I was stationed at Naval Air Station Miramar… now Marine Corps Air Station Miramar.  We were close enough to be able to drive up to Rowland Heights on the weekends to visit family there.  We found a great house in Poway, not too far from work at the air station.  Then the news came that Diane was expecting our third child… on Friday the 13^th of August 1975 our daughter Kimberly was born at a civilian hospital in Escondido, California. Now we could mark our duty stations by where our children were born… Brian at Oak Harbor, Washington; Christopher at Naples Italy and now Kimberly in San Diego.

The Navy wasn’t satisfied by just leaving me alone to work at Miramar; they decided that I should go to North Island Naval Air Station.  Not too far from Miramar, but a mess to have to drive through during rush hour traffic in San Diego.  We decided to move down to Coronado to be closer to work.  We found a relatively cheap house to rent while waiting for Navy housing.  I saved money by riding my bicycle back and forth to work at North Island, and when we were finally assigned base housing in San Diego I learned how to use the public transportation system so I wouldn’t have to drive in traffic and to save money on gas.

With almost ten years of active duty behind me, I decided to enlist in the Navy Reserves and go to school full-time on my GI Bill and Weekend drill pay.  I quickly learned that I needed to make a bit more money, because we no longer had health insurance, which was badly needed when our daughter broke her collar bone when she fell off a swing and then a short time later she came down with pneumonia and had to be hospitalized.  I got a job at Beckman Instruments in La Habra, California. A short time later my old scout master and brother-in-law’s uncle introduced us to the union so we could get a job on the back lot of Disneyland.  Tim went to work on the cars of autopia and I went to work checking the air pressure on the tires of the Monorail train... of course I had other duties, like trimming the tree branches away from the monorail track and cleaning stuff off the track that patrons threw there during the day.  I made good money doing this, and really enjoyed working in an environment very similar to the military.  Disney has a dress and grooming code for employees…I had no problem adapting to those rules with my ten years of military service.  My children really liked the fact that Dad worked at the coolest place in the world, especially when I would drop them and their Mom off in the morning before I would report to work… after I got off in the afternoon, I would scoop up some very tired kids from a bench by the Small World attraction and load them in the car at the employees parking lot.

My shop and the parking lot was just behind the Small World attraction… the only drawback about working in such a location was the “It’s a Small World” tune… many years later it is still embedded in my brain!... I think that I should get disability compensation for such an injury.  Now that I’m old the “

Happiest Place

on Earth can really PISS me off!  You have to pay a huge admission fee to stand in line for two hours for a two minute ride.  But of course you can make a reservation for that ride and report later in the day.  If I wanted to take all of my grandkids to Disneyland I would have to get a second mortgage on my house to buy the tickets.

Thank goodness that my wife made me reenlist in the Navy so we could retire with a pension and inexpensive medical coverage. We are happy with our life… we have our children raised and we get to see our grandchildren quite often… I don’t think that we will ever move again, we have found paradise and the grass isn’t greener here on the other side of the hill that I have to mow, because we don’t have any grass here in this beautiful desert.  The air is clean, we are in small town America where it isn’t over-crowded and everyone knows everyone else and it’s not possible to have traffic jams in town unless the Marines schedule one at the Main Gate to the base… which they do most every morning now that we have terrorist threats to worry about.  We also have a couple of Little League fields where I can sit with my neighbors, friends and family and watch my grandchildren play ball.  My wife, Diane, and I can literally walk out to our back yard and explore the vast Joshua Tree National Park’s hiking trails and sites… life can hardly get any better.