life lessons

Remembering where I came from

Eric Saretsky1 Comment

Looking through old photo albums, when they were actually processed and printed on

paper,  I spent part of Saturday rewinding about 90 years of my family’s history through some dusty albums that were in my garage storage bins for several years.

my dad

Old photos encourage me.  Even seeing my father looking so athletic and proud with his young son dispels memories  of the many years he was crippled by illness.  My dad was a brilliant, funny and an athletic man.  I spent many years of my youth thinking of many negatives: when dad read something in the Wall Street Journal that said that glow-in-the-dark balls were unsafe, I was marched back to the toy store to get my change back.  When we went on road trips I was drilled on my multiplication tables.  Later when my mom and he were divorced,  and dad took me out on his weekend visit, we would go to nice restaurants,  but he always ordered the cheap meals and we filled up on the free rolls and butter.

Only later as an adult, I remembered that he would drive across the country from his job to attend my middle school and high school graduations.   He took a teaching job near our home so he could spend time with me.  At that time he was still trying to get half his body to respond after a stroke – and dealing with people who would equate debilitation with stupidity.   Far from it  – even in that condition.  He graduated near the top of his class in high school and in college as an aerospace engineer but also played sports.   He probably was motivated to excel as my grandfather’s occupations seemed to change as jobs came and went.   Instead, he worked in missile propulsion and development in the early years.  (Which likely helped me to get the jobs I held that involved trust.)  My father died 28 years ago while I was in the service.  I did not find out for two years.

mom

My mother was a good-looking woman;  as sharp mentally as attractive outwardly.  And it must have been quite the catch for my father.   When my maternal grandparents emigrated from Ireland at the end of WWII, she had to contend with Seniors in high school making fun of her accent.  In New Jersey they did not have much else to poke fun at.   She had graduated at the top of her nursing class at Mount Sinai Hospital, and as an R.N. worked with infants, intensive care, emergency treatment, and supervision.  Looking back at my teen years, it no longer seems odd that she pursued a dream to become an english literature scholar and college teacher in middle age.  She became a nurse for the career opportunity that would always be useful and financially secure.  But her passion was elsewhere. 20170423_150516

Mom’s aged photos showed several beaus – a soldier who looks like he only just lost out to my dad;  and some guys who might have been doctors, attorneys or business people.   Among her circle of friends included a Nobel laureate.  But the family photos bear witness to the changes that time, health, and fortunes – waxing and waning produced.

After deciding to marry again, she later learned that her second husband was attracted to children.  That divorce sealed her future as a bitter woman, more inclined to spend her savings on old horses, rescue dogs, cats and a burro.   You see, I have a sister, an adoptee, whom I have rarely spoken with in forty years.  Robin never forgave her mother for divorcing my father and subjecting her to abuse.   We went separate ways after I initially joined the Navy – and she was the one who suffered at the hands of my mother’s second husband.  After thirty years, we last spent any time together in the few months after my mother’s passing six years ago.

son

I chose to go into the Navy as much for the adventure,  the training – which has become the means I earn a living,  and for several veterans’ benefits, as I did to make a clean break from the family.   That’s actually the ironic part,  as I returned after my first enlistment to the same city, Tucson,  to attend the University of Arizona.  My father, still living at the time, moved to Tucson, and I spent time with him and with my mother – still my most ardent cheerleaders for my success.

I can only speak for myself, but I realized around the age of 39, that all of life’s successes mean less than how you handle failure.  Raised with a concept of the spiritual, but never seeing God,  I was continually trying not to be the sum of my upbringing and family.   But after twenty years of a changed life,  I recognize suffering allowed me to treasure the family I have now.   I realize that there is a God that cares for us, but does not force us to engage with him;  most of the world is suffering at the hands of people. For the goodness and love to have any impact, overcoming self-centered attitudes,  misgivings about our childhood,  misgivings about our marriages or children or jobs or finances or health have to be overcome.  Some people blame God for being on the sidelines. Others have no room for God.  Still others have god in their schedules but not in their driver’s seat.

And that is why I can look at these photo albums of people and places that shaped my life with contentment.  I appreciate family history but I am not bound by the people my parents became nor am I limited by my own shortcomings. I trust in my heavenly Father and Lord.   And the future does not hold any fear for me.

Go far in life by going far (away)

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When I initially joined the Navy in the late 70s, I  had already travelled to both coasts of the United States and to Great Britain – Northern Ireland, Scotland and London, England. But as a kid traveling with your parents or with a grandmother,  it doesn’t really make for an adventure.

I joined the Navy to see the world.  For nearly three years, I trained at various bases – in San Diego, at the Great Lakes Naval Training Center north of Chicago, in Pensacola, Florida and in Georgia.   And then I returned to Arizona.    I still wanted to see the world.  So in between university semesters, paid in part by my military service, I spent several weeks each summer on the eastern shore of the Sea of Cortez,  Mexico with a group of scuba divers from Arizona.

I joined the Navy again in 1987 for the adventure – and spent the next three and a half years near Washington, D.C. working as an electronics technician ( a Cryptologic Maintenance Technician specifically).  I travelled all over the region from the shores of Lake Erie in the northwest to New York City, and all the historical places from Philadelphia to Annapolis, and then spent some vacation time as far south as Daytona Beach.   But it was my decision to specifically request a sea-duty assignment, rare for those in my job specialty, when my world travel really took off.

After training, my orders sent me to San Francisco to board a cruiser, the USS TEXAS.   Panama, Ecuador, and then north to and through the Panama Canal to the western Caribbean.  I’ve ordered red snapper dinners in Panama,  cigars and hotel rooms in Ecuador, and taken pictures of the Galapagos Islands as we sailed past.   I’ve lived in the Kitsap peninsula opposite Seattle for a year,  travelled to Esquimalt, British Columbia and Vancouver, Canada.  (it is where I first learned about micro-brew beer and ales).  On different ships and at different times,  I enjoyed visiting countries around the Mediterranean, and one of the first American Navy ships to visit Bulgaria in 50 years.

As a kid who joined the Navy out of high school,  I had been itching to get away from the desert.  I never understood why my old Navy mentors, WWII sailors would have settled in Arizona and not near the sea. “We have had plenty of ocean.  I am here because it is all beach”.   After eight years of sea-duty, I understood that comment.   And I was glad that I had a love of history and foreign languages to complement my technical profession.  I’ve met and hung out with Spaniards in Cartagena, Spain.  Enjoyed smoky jazz and partying with the French in Toulon and Paris,   and sipped cappuccino in Catania, Sicily, Naples and Trieste.  By the way,  Trieste was also the place I was cussed out, in German, by a shopkeeper with he presumed, a German tourist and his lousy italian!

Whether visiting the historical sites of the Minoan civilization – and a 4000 year old queen’s working toilet,  or seeing the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem,  I was grateful for my teachers from high school and college for fostering my interests.

In wartime,  there are often too little focus on the wonder of travel and the opportunities to get to know people.  The world is still full of wonderful places and people, but also dangers that sobers an American’s optimism at times.  In an age when political forces are talking walls and not tackling the forces that cause people to come to the United States,  we have put bandages and temporary dams up.   There are forces also that want there to be no restrictions, and yet are unwilling to discuss the restrictions existing in the travelers own countries.  And language and education advocates want to change history and eliminate a common language.  All of these are just as ignorant as those who have never travelled to faraway places.   America used to lead the world in the post-WWII years not solely out of the hubris of a few, but because it defied the hatreds, disunity, and class struggles of ninety percent of the world’s population.    When Americans travelled to places outside the US, whether in the military or for other purposes, they would get assurances that we had it pretty wonderful.

Reading Mark Twain’s Innocence Abroad, I would love for us to have some of that innocence again.

What is Your "Why"?

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Leave it to an evangelist to publish positive messages and motivation on his FB feed.

At lunch I was looking online at social media, and blogs of people I follow.  One topic that captured my attention was that of failure and success, in that a person succeeds in not giving up after setbacks.  The world we live in is at odds at every turn it seems.    In a world that is wracked with suffering –  there are as many if not more – moments touched by God.  Look closely – a mother gives birth to quadruplets, it is national puppies day, a child rescues another from the clutches of a would-be kidnapper, and an elderly veteran wins the lottery ( the last may be more of a curse than a windfall but remains to be seen).    When the world knocks you down, and against the odds, you determine to stand back up and fight; a fight you will win if you know “your why”.

Lessons of a military life

Eric Saretsky1 Comment

Lesson #1: You’ve got two rights in this world

My early blog post is being retitled and reposted to first in a series of memories that shaped my adult life.  This story is forty years old as of 2018.   

Thirty years ago, a Navy Senior Chief, his name forgotten to history, made a lasting impression on an 18-year old Sailor.  In what was then the Correctional Custody Unit (CCU) at Naval Training Center San Diego, I was a Petty Officer assigned to escort the nearly-bad-but-salvageable characters who were not sent to the brig for various offenses.  On the Monday of the beginning of every other month, a group of malcontent, mostly 18 to 20 year old,  “bootcamps” or fresh recruits and apprentices were lined up at 0700 in the courtyard of a nondescript half-century old building with bars on the windows and a locked front gate.  This was CCU and the Senior Chief, the LCPO.

The Senior Chief was a burly man with a crooked grin, intense eyes and was all-business. He had spent ten years as a combat Marine and then switched services to the Navy as a Gunners Mate.  His deputies were equally salty, the soon-retiring Snipe Chief with weathered skin, alcoholic eyes, missing front teeth — he was busted in the face decades before in a drunken brawl with Shore Patrol in some liberty port.  The  incoming deputy was a hefty Boatwains Mate First Class (“Boats”) who shared the same passion for the Navy and making Sailors out of these men in their charge.

“You’ve got two rights in this world, shipmates”  the Senior Chief bellowed, “One, to live; the other, to die.   And when you F*** up, I’m going to take one away from you!!”   At this, he usually got a snicker from some fool who also had his hands in his pockets.   After an hour of push-ups and eight-count body-builders, while we all enjoyed our coffee, the jokers were then quieter, sweating heavily and not inclined to disrespect their wardens.

 

Flying trucks, drive-thru homes, and miracles

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Bang, Screech, and BANG!  Two A.M on Saturday morning, out of a dead sleep Sheri and I leaped out of bed to see what the commotion was.  (Must be the druggies partying down the street). A few minutes go by. Sheri and I stepped out front,  looked down toward the main road and saw nothing,  only a couple people coming out to the street.  I went inside and then back out as the fire trucks pulled up the street a few moments later.  One of our neighbors joined us. A minute later I saw a couple people from the other direction coming down the street, saying that a truck has driven INTO the house at the top of the street. 
After several minutes we walked up the street to see a truck buried in the corner of a house.  There’s several neighbors gathered, the police and the firemen were moving about.
Our neighbors were first responders. Robert pulled a teenager from the rubble of his bedroom, and Brian shut the power off.   Brian grabbed the passenger who was trying to get away.  By the time we walked up to the house, the sheriff has both occcupants of the truck under arrest.  The twenty-ish woman driver was incoherent as she was escorted to the car past me.  She and the man military-looking seemed to be without a scratch.  An ambulance passed by, taking the teenager who was in the house, to the hospital.   His brother was unhurt simply because he fell asleep in the living room and not in his bedroom which was completely demolished.
A few moments later we found out that these two drunks had smashed into a small trailer, then bashed into a car in the driveway of the house next door, backed up and went forward in the driveway again, smashing it again, pushing a pickup truck behind the first car THROUGH the garage door, then backed up and careened through the victims’ brick mailbox post.  They missed all the cars and trucks parked along the street, and, six houses where the street tees,  launched up a  driveway, over a cement wall and into the bedroom of the other home.  When the F150 was hauled off by the wrecker, it didn’t seem to have suffered that much damage.  (Wonder if Ford would advertise that as “Ford Tough”. )  It was miraculous that no one was killed and that no other cars were smashed on the way.  Oh, and the idiot kids –  the son and his buddies weren’t responsible. The mom, whose two cars and garage was plowed into, kicked them out of the house recently.  Our neighborhood, once insulated, is becoming more crime statistically average.  And to think, all I used to worry about was the probability of an airplane coming down, living in the runway approach to the Gillespie Field airport.

Changing your own oil

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Spending quality minutes with your children older than eighteen is an exercise in creativity.   Take this morning for example.   Getting up before they woke and started to scatter, allowed me to get the honey-do’s done.  Well, it is probably more accurate to say that I needed clean underwear and clean sheets since my sweetheart gone almost all week, was due back from her writing conference later this morning.  At least I wouldn’t have that added to my list of to-dos when the Missus got home.  (And might earn some points for me.)
Matt and I had talked last week about changing the oil in the Honda, and this morning he approached with a window of opportunity for some bonding time.  Of all the discussion and the lessons on the costs and benefits of clean oil, I’m sure the one take-away from this morning was how cool the hand-cleaner was in removing the dirty oil from our hands.   There might have been another lesson on getting the oil filter off too.  And until some other dad or garage mechanic shows him the oil wrench one uses to remove stubbornly-tight filters, my hammer and screwdriver lever action will be a sharp trick employed by creative ol’ dad.