Whenever I am out and about amongst new folks or socializing in a group setting where people do not know me or anything about who I am or what I do, the usual chit-chat starts getting bantered about, with the typical mundane questions about who you are, where you live, etc.
The conversation will always veer to some variant of “What do you do for work?”
When I reply, “I Play Golf,” the conversation immediately takes on a whole different vibe and direction.
Sometimes, they look skeptical, laugh, and repeat the question, “What do you really do?”
Others might say, “Oh, you are retired, or some other clever remark or comeback, as they then delve deeper and inquire, “What did you do before that?”
When the answer is still the same, the conversation begins with the business and nonsense of explaining that I am a Golf Professional by trade.
Golf is my real job, and it has been for over fifty years. I have been involved in the sport my whole life.
Then begins a detailed and tiresome process of amplifying and adding details to my almost half-century engagement and membership in the Professional Golfers Association of America as a PGA Master Professional, coupled with an endless variety and assortment of tasks I have performed while playing Golf.
Additionally, I have been in the public arena as a Broadcast Journalist, Author, and Talk Radio Host for almost forty years.
I also air a weekly two-hour syndicated golf show, blog, and podcast.
Experience that covers the whole gambit of my working career in the golf business.
After reciting my resume and career highlights, the dialogue might continue if the person is still interested, has yet to fall asleep, or has yet to walk away.
In that case, the conversation usually involves a rundown of the golf courses I have worked at, positions held, tournaments I have played in, Championships I have covered, and whether I know Tiger Woods, etc.
Invariably, if the exchange persists and lingers, it never fails; “What is your favorite golf course?”
That inquiry generates a whole new litany of responses and answers.
Because that is a question I cannot answer.
It is akin to, who is your favorite child, preferred city, or most-beloved relative?
It is an impossible task to convey or consider because each of the hundreds of golf courses around the world I have worked at, played, visited, or broadcasted from during my journey throughout my golfing life calls up a particular delight and appreciation of each of those individual locations, events, or tournaments.
Each one summons its own remarkable recollections, histories, and memories.
How do you choose?
I cannot, or the simple reason is that every golf course on earth, in my view, is a whimsical, fanciful, and genuinely memorable destination, a beautiful thing like a fine wine, a work of art, or a unique piece of music, regardless of where or when I might have encountered those properties or traveled to on this planet.
There is no place on earth I would rather be than on a golf course as the sun sets on the finishing holes and the end of another blissful, perfect day.
I have spent much of my adult life recording and preserving those reflections as best I can, for each visit is distinctive, extraordinary, and incredibly special.
My passage into Golf was foreordained and determined from an early age.
That emersion and foray into the lifestyle of Professional Golf that fated this engagement combined two separate yet cooperative historical accounts: the Mormon pioneer saga and Golf’s early history in the Western United States.
Each of these narratives embarks during the middle of the eighteenth century on the eve of Golf’s first significant expansion into America’s consciousness and the Mormon’s enforced displacement into Utah Territory and unfolds with this venerated account and portrayal.
Three days before Brigham Young led the Mormon migration into the Great Salt Lake Basin on July 24, 1847, Erastus Snow and Orson Pratt entered the Valley on an advanced reconnaissance exploration.
They turned left at the mouth of the Emigration Canyon, following the route Interstate 215 now occupies on the Valley’s eastern side.
After circumventing and exploring the valley floor, those adventuring explorers returned to their entry point, below the opening of Emigration Canyon, high on the rocky foothills of the east bench, then trekked further south, setting their base camp at the mouth of Obit-ko-ke-che, ean’ka-so-kuup, The Goshute Indian Tribes’ name for Big Canyon, from which flowed a crystal clear creek, later giving the region its anglicized name and identity.
The area and stream of their discovery were later renamed for Parley P. Pratt, who settled the area and built the first road navigating the passage through the canyon.
This road evolved as the pioneers’ primary entry into the Valley and later developed as a major east-west freeway across Middle America.
Those men realized then, and what history has since acknowledged to many people that select this Valley as their home, the beauty, accessibility, and setting of the Parley’s Creek Corridor make this one of the most choice and inhabitable avenues in the Salt Lake Valley.
The abundance of arable land, vegetation, wildlife, vistas, and the essential element in a high mountain desert, an abundant water source, impressed those early Mormon scouts.
When he arrived two days later, the advance party encouraged the Mormon leader to settle in this part of the Valley; nevertheless, when Brigham Young emerged from the canyon, he turned right and set up the main encampment for his intrepid band of pioneers farther north on the flatter land and banks of the more dependable-flowing stream of City Creek.
Whether owing to divine inspiration or the genius of a master colonizer, President Young saw, on that hot, steamy July day, the main encampment for those hardy trailblazers, now Utah’s capital city, lay on the northward end of the Salt Lake Valley, not the south.
However, that is not how this story concludes or the ending of those early pioneers’ encounters with the Salt Lake Valley’s distinctive topography.
Little did those early pioneers realize the ribbon of water flowing from the yawning portals of Parleys Canyon would provide a natural corridor that coursed through the heart of the Salt Lake Valley, used not only for traversing the wetlands and boggy marshes that carpeted the Valley’s expansive countryside, but expanding the riparian interface, creating natural sandbars, ledges, fertile plains, and flatlands while depositing its rich loamy topsoil forming the landscape for the numerous settlements, farms, orchards, cities, and towns that would later be developed and scattered across in the Salt Lake Valley while framing the streams pathway on its inevitable advance towards the Great Salt Lake.
When Mormon pioneers fleeing religious persecution first entered the Salt Lake Valley, Utah, it was a vast, barren, high-mountain desert with few natural stream beds and flowing waterways; Parley’s Creek was one of those and bisected the middle of the Valley.
Indigenous tribes of Native Americans had long since left the area, leaving the hardscrabble newcomers to fend for themselves with little more than what they could carry on their backs; these early pilgrims arrived in the Great Salt Lake Basin, scrapping for food, shelter, and the necessities of life.
That soon changed.
Six months after Brigham Young led the historic Mormon exodus into the greater Salt Lake Valley and the winter snows had cleared, he sent his envoys throughout the region to explore and colonize potential settlements, with the directive “Go forth and prosper.”
When settlers got established and put down their roots, those hardy pioneers first built a church to worship, a cemetery to mourn, honor, and bury their dead, and a community park where the public could recreate and gather socially.
Golf was introduced to America in the early part of the 19th century, just fifty years after the imposed Mormon relocation, and gained popularity nationally with the likes of Bobby Jones, Gene Sarazen, and Walter Hagan and locally with Salt Lake native George Von Elm, bringing exposure to the sport; it was only natural for those early Mormon communities to add a golf course to their recreational and outdoor areas.
Those first courses were crude, elementary designs, hand-built, supported, financed, and operated by the local population, which in some measure explains all the quirky, idiosyncratic, modest nine-hole golf courses found throughout the State and why Utah has the highest percentage, of public golf courses, per capita, anywhere in America.
In 1894, the sport of Golf took on a national identity when the United States Golf Association, formed with five original members, was organized to promote the game, develop rules, and foster competitions on a national scale.
With newfound stability and structure, the game of Golf continued to grow, expand, and flourish.
By 1910, there were 267 golf clubs in America, including Utah’s first golf course, The Salt Lake Country Club, located right smack dab on the banks of Parley’s Creek, and the golf course I grew up next to and learned to play upon.
An area and neighborhood that allowed me to submerge myself in the game of Golf, a sport that launched me on the road to a life and career in a business that had flowed through my personality and ingrained itself in my presence from the beginning of my first exposure to the ancient Scottish pastime.
As an active, curious child, I was blessed to be born and come of age in a middle-class environment with loving parents who had few structural or economic disadvantages.
My family was neither well-off nor privileged, but I cannot remember wanting or needing much while growing up.
I was a happy, complacent child with boundless optimism and countless opportunities for enjoyment and diversion owing to my large family unit and our extended community.
My family were sixth-generation Mormons and direct descendants of pioneers who emigrated to Utah in 1847.
We lived in the Sugarhouse suburbs of Salt Lake City with all the related cultural and social benefits and communal advantages of a built-in convergence of similar and like-minded cohorts, friends, and neighbors.
Households and neighborhoods connected and intertwined with the ever-present and ubiquitous LDS meetinghouses, which populated all Utah communities and, in my immediate area, were situated directly across the street from where I was raised.
Places of worship with an attached culture hall and full-sized gymnasiums were always open, offering cost-free services while supplying year-round recreation possibilities, spiritual guidance, surrogate fostering, and an incomparable environment to grow, learn, play, and develop.
This wholesome, safe, and moral environment where I was raised was one city block, just three football fields away from what was once the private Salt Lake Country Club, now renamed and maintained for public use as Forest Dale Golf Course with its historic clubhouse left behind from its Country Club days, where I was raised, hung out, and came of age.
This oversized and sprawling property contained not just a golf course, but a sizeable inner-city park, nourished by the ever-present Parley’s Creek, with ponds, creeks, fields, and meadows for exploration and adventure, with an attendant swimming pool, tennis courts, ball fields, and picnic areas adjacent to a Boys and Girls Club, maintained by the YMCA, which offered unlimited amusement, hobbies, leisure, and social activities.
It was a magical place to grow up, a recreational wonderland that satisfied my every wish, need, whim, and desire.
In my Pollyannaish nativity, I believed every kid in the world grew up and got to experience the same idyllic upbringing and environments I took for granted every day of my youth.
Little did I realize that my background, childhood, and growing-up years were gilded and fortuitous.
Like most kids raised in Middle America during the post-war era of the 1950s and ’60s, the outdoors was the place to be and all it entailed.
Long before the electronic revolution deadened the senses of following generations, baby boomers, born mid-century as my age group was collectively called, had to create our playfields, and make up our games.
Cops and Robbers, Cowboys and Indians, Pirates and Buccaneers.
Nightly raids on the neighbor’s gardens and orchards.
We were wading and swimming in the ponds and streams provided on behalf of with the crystal clear and chilly Parley’s Creek waters, that filled our immediate play areas with no health concerns whatsoever.
Climbing trees and playing in the woods and fields, we engaged in get-up-and-go like there was no tomorrow.
We had fun and enjoyed life, scrapping, tussling, roaming in the streets, growing up, hunting, fishing, and playing sports on the backlots, alleys, fields, and open spaces wherever the need or inclination arose.
We did it all with unrestricted playtime without parent intervention and then did it all again.
And why not?
We were invincible, strong, and never got tired or bored.
It was an era of boundless joy and harmony.
No one in my community locked their doors to their houses, nor were parents concerned about where or what you did if you were home before dark.
The neighborhood policed itself, including other kids on the block, if they warranted or deserved it.
Ours was the first group of American youth to survive a worldwide apocalypse, and as an entire generation, we had no clue how blessed and lucky we were.
Nor did we care or ponder the reasons why.
We lived for the moment, whether morning, noon, or night; tomorrow was another day with more fun and adventure.
Rough and tumble was the game’s name, and we were free-range children without overbearing and unnecessary supervision.
Those who had survived the forgoing battles, our parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and all those who had done the heavy lifting, performed the heroic deeds, made the sacrifices, they knew how blessed and lucky our generation was to now live in a new age of peace, prosperity, and tranquility.
The older generation and those who had prevailed and survived the days of reckoning understood on a profoundly personal level how self-sacrificing, just, and admirable the world was to have escaped the worst aspects of human nature and behavior that could have affected the entire global population with catastrophic and disastrous results.
Our parents and their parents had endured two world wars and the most significant depression humans have ever seen.
It was a time of great turmoil and introspection for a tattered and tired group of older Americans now looking for an improved and more peaceful lifestyle for themselves, their offspring, and their families, and why our parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles became contemporary history’s most accommodating, lenient, and tolerant mentors and guardians the world as ever known.
My generation grew up with this mindset, and our parents’ reluctance to impose limits on their kids prompted baby boomers to become the most permissive, selfish, indulgent, and entitled age bracket humanity has ever seen.
Sex, drugs, and rock and roll became our mantra and were a universal anthem amongst our peer group.
Our entire age bracket identified with the movement’s philosophy even if you did not join in physically.
You were part of it and wistfully embraced it, if only in your most secret dreams and fantasies.
Who did not wish they had attended Woodstock?
Grow their hair out, surf the beach, fall in love, and dance the night away without a care in the world?
We partook of all the forbidden fruits and selfish pleasures that society offered, as did most of the people I grew up with, associated with, and knew socially.
We all participated in some form or another.
It was a lifestyle we thought would never end, and we lamented grievously when it did.
An existence and mentality that persisted throughout life and inflicted profound consequences and outcomes that endured into parenthood and middle age that influenced and changed how we, as an entire generation, perceived the world, raised our children, and interacted with society.
Amidst this awakening and social reckoning, I grew up marching to a slightly different tune and circumstances.
I was a nerdy, curious jock and not much for television, work, or girls as I matured and started to develop physically and emotionally.
Books, sports, and the outdoors occupied all my waking hours.
Football, baseball, and basketball, each in their season, with a bit of Golf thrown in to fill the gaps; if I was not playing or practicing sports, I was reading, which I continue to do.
My favorite day of the week in summer was always Mondays, when the bookmobile from the public library stopped on my block across from the house, and I could replenish my weekly allotment of new stories to check out.
I devoured the latest volume cover-to-cover during those quiet, peaceful, undisturbed waking hours when I was not involved in some form of outdoor amusement or competitive sports.
I continued this pattern throughout my public school education, a ritualistic exercise of stopping at the library each morning, selecting a new book, reading it throughout the day, and returning it after school.
A practice I carried out throughout my entire Middle and High School years.
I was a bright, curious student, and school came easy except for math, which came back to haunt me when I entered graduate school and had to take remedial algebra to complete my statistics and marketing courses.
I read fast, retained comprehension, recalled obscure facts, figures, and minutiae, and took a good test.
I also had the beastly habit of marking my place in each new volume by bending the top right corner of the last page I had finished at a forty-five-degree angle to remind me of my spot and if I had read the book by checking the pages for creases.
By the time I graduated, I had perused and marked most of the books in my school’s libraries.
My interests run the gamut of popular fiction, human interest stories, biographies, and history; curiously, I needed more inclination when pursuing romantic, science fiction, or fantasy literature.
At an early age, however, I became enthralled with “New Journalism” and writers who diligently researched their subjects, scripted their dialogue intensely, and immersed themselves in it.
My reading involvement began with young adult works on adventure, sports, and history but soon progressed into the contemporary classics, including Mark Twain, Robert Louis Stevenson, Earnest Hemmingway, Arthur Conan Doyle, Jack London, John Marquand, James Michener, John Steinbeck, Virginal Woolf, Leon Uris, Herman Wouk, Joseph Conrad, and Scott Fitzgerald.
I tried to read them all.
As my tastes evolved, I became interested in Gonzo, Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion, Hunter Thompson, P.J. O’Rorke, and Gay Talese.
I enjoyed literature that let the writer enter the story with their opinions, ideas, and personal involvement and take me along.
Naturally, being a sports and golf guy, I was enthralled and soon immersed myself in the commentaries and prose of Benard Darwin, Grantland Rice, Jim Murray, Furman Bisher, Dick Taylor, Dan Jenkins, Henry Longhurst, and Herbert Warren Wind, all preeminent sports journalists, and except for Darwin and Rice, I was fortunate to know and later worked with each of these esteemed writers in pressrooms, golf tournaments, and sporting events around the world.
What I learned from each of those authors’ examples was that they used the playing fields of sport as metaphors for life’s lessons while emphasizing and characterizing the absolute absurdity of the games, the athletes who played them, the oversized privilege and excess ego of the participants who collectively share considerable confidence in their talent and abilities born of inherited genetics, and the out-and-out humor and amusement through it all.
It was a thrilling atmosphere to roam about and associate in.
It was easy to embrace as a philosophy as I later became a PGA Golf Professional, Writer, and Broadcast Journalist.
I began my journey considering the possibilities of a future in the golf business when I returned home to Utah following an overseas deployment in the United States Army.
My path in life before my epiphany pursuing a golf lifestyle was a caricature of conflicts: physical, intellectual, moral, and emotional.
In my quarter of a century of existence, after a succession of varied and diverse involvements and experiences, I had yet to understand where I was going or how to get there; my life was a muddle of desires, wants, and aspirations.
I was still determining what I wanted to do or what I wanted to be.
I needed direction, vision, and forethought to prepare for the rest of my life’s ups and downs, which, in my youthful exuberance, I thought I had acquired.
I realized that all past experiences and encounters needed to be more robust in substance, and it took a while to cultivate and understand.
Life was carefree and straightforward when I graduated high school, and the direction was specific.
I would be attending Utah State University in Logan, Utah.
I was on a scholarship and wanted to see if I could play football at the next level.
The University allowed me that opportunity and the bonus of getting away from home and venturing on my own.
Both experiences were dreadful mistakes and hugely unsuccessful.
Football was fun for a while, but I quickly realized that with my lack of talent and lingering injuries from high school, I would never play in the NFL, and the exercise soon became tedious and just another chore.
Living away from home in the dorms is mandatory for incoming first-year students with its attendant rules, procedures, and protocols.
It was too much work and confining for my disposition and temperament.
Coupled with the casual indifference of so many students from differing cultures, backgrounds, and ethnicities to abide by and adhere to communal norms, conduct, and polite and mindful manners, the environment required restraint and self-discipline, which was difficult.
I am not racist, a prude, or homophobic, but there was so much noise, clamor, turmoil, and far too many people all living in the same place, creating a cacophony of annoyance and commotion.
So, I pledged to a fraternity to escape the forced residency constraints of communal living with other students.
I then moved into the chapter house on fraternity row, satisfying the University’s requirement to live on campus.
This only marginally raised the quantity and quality of my new housemates’ life experiences, behaviors, and imaginary level of sophistication, with the presumed privilege each claimed as their right.
This was combined with the endless parties and mindless chatter that surrounded the diminished size of the populace I was now compelled to live and socialize with.
So, after two years, I quit, dropped out of school before they kicked me out, went back home with my tail between my legs, and explained and apologized to my disappointed parents that I was not cut out for college life or living with other people, and got a job, which seemed the next step in the evolutionary process.
Growing up, I had many assorted and odd jobs, working part-time as a paper carrier, dishwasher, server’s assistant, and baker’s assistant in the service industry.
Nothing serious piqued my interest or career expectations.
My first real job out of high school, when I was expecting to play football in college, was working in manufacturing and construction, and I loathed everything about it.
From the early morning wakeups, the grime and drudgery, the sheer labor-intensive physicality, and packing a lunch bucket every day.
Most of all, I saw and felt my fellow workers’ discontent and unhappiness about their predicament and lack of a foreseeable future.
I vowed then that was not the existence I would choose.
I needed to be happy, and most of all, work had to be enjoyable, whatever career path it directed me down.
After my foray into college and returning home to the safety and privacy of my parent’s home and my old, comfortable bedroom, I went to work in retail sales, peddling women’s shoes in downtown Salt Lake City, Utah, and discovered I enjoyed it immensely.
I embraced the lifestyle, standard of living, and the hustle and bustle of big-city employment, as well as the everyday delight of interacting with new, different, and exciting people, using my wits, wearing nice clothes, and working a flexible schedule with time off for social activities, making new friends and acquaintances, lunch, and late-night dinners.
Plus, I was making good money, learning a craft, enjoying living, having fun, and meeting people.
The city center business culture of the mid-sixties has heady stuff for a wannabe man-about-the-town putting on airs and spreading his nascent wings trying to soar above the day-to-day and crowded playing fields of unadventurous and indifferent, staid, predictable, baby boomer adolescents pushing, and shoving their way to sameness below.
However, this serendipitous and satisfactory lifestyle I was enjoying, moving smoothly forward amidst the flowers, love, and sexual freedom of the Beat Generation in undisturbed and peaceful contentment, could not last and, regrettably, ended abruptly.
As I and the rest of those living in those giddy and intoxicating times soon realized, the proverbial rug could be pulled out from beneath us at any given moment, and the sparkle of this beguiling existence could shift in a heartbeat, and it soon did with remarkable alacrity.
The realization of impending reckoning was first unmasked when the United States, to its everlasting folly and regret, waged battle, and destruction against a small, impoverished Indo-China nation for dubious reasons, altering the trajectory, hopes, dreams, and aspirations of an entire generation of young men entering the best part of their lives.
America was now in a State of War, and being of prime age, the United States Government requested my attendance, and I responded.
A product and offspring of the Greatest Generation and the ingrained pride of country and flag that cohort instilled in their progeny, I replied to my Nation’s call of duty by joining the Utah National Guard and enlisting in the United States Army’s 19th Special Forces Group (Airborne)
I was justifiably proud of my military service, including the rigorous and specialized training I endured during those turbulent years of the Vietnam conflict.
I took pride in serving, becoming a celebrated Special Forces member, achieving Airborne Qualification, attending the intensive Special Operations Qualification School, working towards earning my Special Forces Tab, and wearing the coveted Green Beret.
For the next five years, during those turbulent and malevolent times, I juggled my job responsibilities, full and part-time military service, career moves, and the ups and downs of conventional life as I sought higher and meaningful purpose amongst the rapid social upheavals of a polarized and conflicted world that was rapidly transforming and revolutionizing the very fabric of its and my existence.
The sixties era was strange and chaotic, and navigating with many conflicting motives, causes, and feelings was challenging.
Civil Rights, Voting Rights, Gay Rights, Women’s Rights, the Counterculture Movement, the sexual revolution, and a noted uptick in environmental concerns all co-occurred simultaneously.
While I tried my best to live and function in a presumed, conventional, mainstream reality.
Seeking some decorum and responsibility, I settled into a mundane, unremarkable, everyday life and envisioned establishing deeper roots, getting married, and investing in a home and business.
I climbed the corporate ladder, succeeded, was promoted to management, and transferred to Denver, Colorado, in 1967.
Fortune and my home-schooled values now influenced and governed my every practice, and I was caught up in the ethos of the time, where my future was predictably ordained, defined, and established.
After years of contradiction, I was settling down and following the blueprint my parents had installed in my character.
Then, in 1968, the world I knew and was beginning to enjoy and appreciate was turned upside down just as the society and culture I recognized was about to shatter.
After achieving some measure of success in the social pecking order during those peaceful, laid-back Summer of Love Days, I relaxed into a predictable routine that quickly collapsed at the seams.
In a few short months, the brutal murder of progressive icons Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King shook society’s foundation.
On the war front, the Tet Offensive in Vietnam shocked the military-industrial complex, forever changing the American Public’s belief in a conflict being fought at significant personal and economic cost, far from American shores.
Nationally, anti-war riots broke out in Chicago, Detroit, and other large cities, and Middle-Class America was shocked at the violence the Peace and Love Generation perpetrated against established authority and rule.
This forceful and militant behavior of Peaceniks ended the years of possibility, promise, and optimism that had begun with a man on the moon and ended in days of rage and abandoned the illusion of a pleasure-seeking, self-absorbed cohort that defined the complexities and amoralities of the mid-sixties.
Finally, the defining action of this era, severely tarnishing the baby-boomer generation’s peaceful persona and putting an ending to the Nation’s years of hope for a kinder, gentler America while sealing my fate and that of many of my contemporaries.
North Korea had blatantly seized the American naval vessel US Pueblo, capturing eighty-three crew members aboard, intensifying the disagreement and State of War between The United States and North Korea.
North Korea’s military aggression escalated the ongoing struggle between the two long-time adversaries, altering the national military posture, forgoing all graduate school deferments, and ending all college exemptions from the draft while precipitating the calling up of military reserves and extending their terms of military service.
Including yours truly, my life would suddenly and irrevocably be altered by events and circumstances upon which I had no control, influence, or direction.
I was now back on full-time active duty, wearing a uniform again, firmly in the grasp of the Military Industrial Complex, and at the mercy of forces and conditions beyond my command.
Three weeks later, after rapidly buttoning up all my pressing commitments and obligations, including saying goodbye to my fiancé and long-time girlfriend whom I would never see again, leaving my burgeoning, middle-class lifestyle, work, and living arrangements, which I could never return to, I reported to Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, and the overseas replacement station awaiting immediate transport to the Republic of South Korea, and a War Zone I thought I would never grasp, see, nor participate in.
Dazed, and shortly after arriving in Pusan on the southern tip of the peninsula, I was headed north, traveling above the 38th parallel towards the Demilitarized Zone separating North and South Korea, where I would spend the next thirteen months, twenty-three days, carrying a loaded weapon, collecting hazardous duty pay, contemplating my future, or lack of, and wondering how in the world my life, expectations, and prospects could be transformed so quickly, with such devasting consequences, and how this could have happened to me?
The only enduring thought about my present dilemma and its long, lonely nights ahead was that I had a year to contemplate my situation with its predictable dreariness and monotony because I had nowhere to go and plenty of time to think about my future plans.
By some perverse logic, as I deliberated my predicament, the recurring thought that ran through my subconscious mind was that, somehow, I had gotten a makeover.
I had been saved from a mundane, conventional, and banal life I had been fast-tracked for and one I did not appreciate nor relish spending the rest of my life pursuing or working at.
By powers beyond my control, I now had a clean slate that had wiped out all my yesterdays, the history, accounts, and relationships of times gone by, good and bad, and I could now shape and mold my destiny, whatever it might be, from this point on, as I saw fit in whatever direction it might be.
The only dilemma was that I was in the army six thousand miles from home and had to get out of Korea sane and in one piece.
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