Ends - Winter Solstice 2021

 

The time of secrets is upon us. Today, I’ll share one of mine.

 

People often underestimate me. Mostly, I think, because I try to get along. Unless I implicitly trust the individuals I’m with, I listen more than I talk. I also watch how they treat others, fully aware from experience that if they treat others poorly, I or someone I value could be next. I am generally conflict-averse but not above it.

 

That dichotomy confuses some and leads them into thinking I am weak or an easy target. In reality, I am just choosing my moment and method to strike if necessary. Mostly, I just hope any issue goes away. Because when I choose to act, it’s game on.

 

As readers may remember from Switching Sides, the engineering setting I worked in was often confrontational and contentious. Toxic is a better word. Years after the events laid out in that essay, I found myself at a crossroads. By then I’d set down a financial plan that eventually led me to where I am today. That plan was still years away from fruition, four to five to be exact. But I am patient and goal-oriented. Once I set one in my mind, I am likely to see it through. At least when the time is right. Life doesn’t always cooperate.

 

At that time, I was still unhappy with my day-to-day. Mr. Wizard, I don’t want to be a defense contractor anymore. For a number of reasons and unique circumstances, I didn’t feel I had much choice, not at that exact moment. I had a mortgage. I would soon have a spouse. I wanted to move but she didn’t. Her career was bound up with our current location.

 

By this point, the toxicity of team rivalry in my workplace had morphed into a new kind of tribalism. Bias and prejudice against women and minorities in my workplace were patently obvious to anyone with eyes. There were inappropriate jokes and nicknames, and slights meant to cast individuals’ race or gender or religion into stark relief. Often to their face. Often in a distinct power play. Often within management’s hearing. A distinct old boy’s network was very much in evidence.

 

To give you an example, one of my coworkers, one of the sharpest, most talented, most intelligent engineers I worked with, was dinged on her annual review for the way she dressed (which wasn’t provocative even at the time). Not only dinged but called into her supervisor’s office to specifically address the situation with interim reviews. Her middle-aged, white, male supervisor who had enough contacts and seniority to be considered untouchable. All the women I listened to considered this outrageous. I don’t think this man understood that corporate culture had begun to change.

 

Around this time, the system my project was designing was in the middle of demonstration and certification. Which meant extended fieldwork all around. Unlike the previous rounds of fieldwork that I’d been involved in, this time our workforce, specifically our software department which heavily figured into the design, was more gender-integrated, or at least had more than minor female representation.

 

Management had no experience in dealing with that. Which showed when they laid down a set of unique rules that only applied to women who went to the field. One of these was that they had to observe a strict buddy system. So, unless two women’s schedules and expertise aligned, neither could be assigned to a field site. Management viewed this as a safety issue, although clearly it did not apply to all travel. Women traveled to our client’s site alone all the time. Another rule was that women couldn’t be assigned to a support a ship even if that ship was in port. They would only be allowed aboard if there was no other option, read no other male was capable of performing their job. This was seen as necessary so as not antagonize the Navy or its commanders. There were a host of other minor guidelines, all of which amounted to making it difficult for women to get field assignments whether they wanted them or not.

 

Fieldwork in engineering is often a make-or-break opportunity for career development and advancement. Especially in defense contracting. If you keep a site up and running smoothly under adverse conditions, you can find yourself in the spotlight. If you are the individual who solves a critical problem holding up a test or demonstration, you are suddenly a hero. Upper management remembers your name. Promotions are in the offing. As are team lead positions required to advance.

 

As well, the field is not a design review. It’s not even like the lab. The problems you encounter under real-world conditions provide insight into future designs and inform the way you debug problems. The field is a practical, not theoretical, experience for any design or systems engineer. It’s also a moment to shine as you highlight your understanding of the overall system, not just your tiny segment, along with any interpersonal or technical skills you bring along.

 

In other words, unless you are the best ivory tower designer or system architect, your career may depend on how you perform in the field.

 

Which requires being there.

 

This was well understood the day those field rules for women were announced. As I remember it, they were only announced to the women themselves, not to all members of the team. Perhaps I missed the meeting. But I distinctly remember the information came down to me secondhand. By this time, I was slated for significant fieldwork. Volunteered for it, in fact. I knew from my previous stints of extended fieldwork how critical it could be.

 

The women who discussed the rules with me were generally offended. They had maybe one advocate in the lowest level of the management chain. When they complained to her, she had stated their case and was overruled by upper management. Vehemently and with alacrity. They considered the gender rules settled divisional law. Case closed. Protest at your peril.

 

That attitude didn’t ameliorate the situation or the undercurrent of dissent. This was not a happy sailor is a bitching sailor scenario. Mostly these women were junior engineers who had come up in a time that promised them equal treatment, much more than women just five years their senior. But they had no agency and knew it, other than voting with their feet. I got the sense many were growing used to this level of bias and discrimination, and had begun to accept it as a given.

 

As a warning shot or a distress flare, a couple years earlier my company had gotten caught up in a pay scandal which was pretty unusual for a defense contractor, the resolution not the act. In their annual reviews and raises that year, a number of employees found their base pay raised significantly, in some cases by double digits. The official explanation was that the company was transitioning to a new employee evaluation system that placed people in quartiles based on current and previous review scores, each with a minimum salary they should receive within their job title.

 

The unofficial reason for these startling but selective raises was far more troubling. For whatever reason (likely under government duress, or from due diligence by an ever-present buyout suitor), the company had reviewed the salaries of women and minorities and found both to be significantly underpaid compared to their generally white, male counterparts with equivalent experience and education. To the point where certain female and minority employees were earning below even the minimum salaries for their job titles by 10-20%.

 

These pay deficits were large enough that it sometimes took two years of what amounted to unheard of raises for certain individuals to catch up because of corporate policies that limited any employee’s annual raise to a maximum of 10%. In at least one case I have direct knowledge of, an individual (whose voluntarily disclosed ethnicity marked them as a minority) received first a 10% raise one year, followed by nearly 10% raise the next. This in a time when a 3% raise was considered good.

 

Of course, the true explanation was veiled in secrecy although rumors of what had happened abounded. It wasn’t hard to sort out who got good raises and what they might have in common. In the way of all management, they discouraged employees from comparing salaries for just this reason. But in the way of all employees, they often did if only informally and circling the edges. Rumors were abundant about who made what and where they fell on the department’s informal totem pole for the ever-present next round of layoffs. I had the truth confirmed a few years after I’d left the company by a friend who sat in on some of the meetings where that pay disparity had been discussed.

 

Right after this, the company made a concerted effort to hire more women and minorities, many of whom were gone within five years. Some number directly because of the reception they received.

 

From my earlier experience, I was more outraged than jaded when my management announced those the gender-based fieldwork rules. I refused to accept them as the norm. I took the situation as a personal affront. Precisely because I knew how I’d benefited from fieldwork in the past and thought others deserved that same opportunity. I was sick of seeing petty egos who I never saw as that outstanding threatened by perceived competition. I’ve never seen diversity as a threat to my position or career. I’ve always seen it as my opportunity to work with, and learn from, the best. Period.

  

Discrimination always sets me off when I sniff it out, even if the people around me don’t always note it. I’ve brushed up against too much prejudice too many times concerning too many friends, black, female, and/or gay.

 

The problem was, I had no real agency then either. I wasn’t particularly senior, just a few years more senior than the women I’d heard from. I didn’t have any contacts higher up the chain that might give me a hearing. But I knew in my heart what I was seeing was discriminatory and unethical.

 

While I am goal-oriented, I am also a problem solver. People who know me understand that when I set my mind to something, I know how to get things done.

 

And yet there was a problem with tilting at ideological windmills in my environment. There was a very real threat of reprisals against anyone who pushed the issue. That I’d learned from a long line of experience. I had an idea of what my company’s management would and wouldn’t tolerate. I also knew how far they would go to reinforce their reputation and protect their prerogatives.

 

The example foremost in my mind involved our division’s annual savings bond drive. Our company had a reputation of universal voluntary employee participation in buying US Savings Bonds. Higher than a similar campaign to support the United Way. Our divisional vice president had more invested in the savings bond campaign than any charity. Our 100% participation rate resulted in him being flown out to corporate headquarters each year to be feted. A trip he relished and had come to expect as his due.

 

The thing is, that 100% participation was only on paper. But the division took it seriously enough to assign people, usually supervisors or people aspiring to promotion, to talk to everyone in their department who hadn’t already signed up. On company time. Their pitch was that you could have as little as a quarter a week ($0.25) deducted from your check and assign it to a bond with a face value as high as $500 ($250 purchase price). Which meant it would take nearly 20 years to get one issued. If you left the company before then, all that money would come back to you.

 

When I was first approached, I looked over the information including the rates of return (which at the time were locked in as long you owned the bond) and decided it was a good way to create an emergency savings fund that I might later use to buy a house. This was before George H. W. Bush changed the terms by fiat, directing that the interest rates float at a reduced market rate to save the government money. Which basically gutted the biggest benefit of the program.

 

Either way, it didn’t matter to me. It was still a convenient way to save money that was accessible outside retirement with a reasonable return.

 

It did matter to a friend of mine who had been hired a couple years later. He was a savvier investor. He looked over the terms then turned in his card, declining to participate. Which meant his savings bond representative, in this case his direct supervisor, came around to ask him to reconsider. Because this was a “voluntary” program, he politely declined. Which then resulted in him getting called first into his manager’s office, then a program manager’s office (the one who told people who complained they were lucky to have jobs), a director’s office (who once ripped the wallpaper off of a conference room wall while demanding the name of an engineer who had accidently damaged a piece of equipment so he could fire him on the spot) and finally into our divisional VP’s office (the one whose trip to Texas depended on my friend’s participation), each stop with an increasing amount of pressure and intimidation. A lot of attention for a junior engineer.

 

I very much remember my friend describing his final encounter with our divisional VP. When asked why he wouldn’t participate after hearing how good of an investment these bonds were, my friend simply answered, “I have better investments that make more money elsewhere” and laid out exactly what they were. After a brief stunned silence, that encounter quickly turned to veiled threats about him not being a team player with the unspoken understanding that his refusal would be remembered when raises and promotions came around.

 

My friend remained unphased. After seeing the way the division operated, he wasn’t planning to make a career out of our company anyway. In fact, he took a better paying job within a year. A very sharp design engineer who we should have been trying to retain. He’d recognized the strong undercurrent of good ole boy network tinged with sometimes very literal gun-toting conservatism (one of my former supervisors carried a handgun in his briefcase). Many of the people we worked with were former military which shaped their thinking in ways most civilians didn’t cotton to.

 

As it turned out, the US Navy was also in transition at this time, against its will, as was American society at large. Around this time, our recently elected President was considering repealing the prohibition against female military personnel serving on combatant ships, which he did several months later. After the debacle of the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings under the previous Administration a few years before (rivaled only by the recent confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh), his EEOC suddenly had some teeth. The times they were a-changing.

 

All of which I understood as I examined the board and plotted out my best, most productive move.

 

Because I had no agency, and because I knew the threat of reprisals was very real, I treated this as an asymmetric warfare situation. I listened as events unfolded as a way to gather intelligence but I kept my own counsel. I didn’t grumble to anyone, not even friends, or give a hint that I planned to act. But plan to act I did. From the moment I heard those gender-based fieldwork rules announced.

 

Because our company was a defense contractor, many of which had been caught up in various ethical scandals dating back to Reagan, we had mandatory ethics training every year. From that, I knew we had a corporate ethics department. I knew their contact information was in our employee handbook.

 

But I was not naïve. I knew that corporate ethics departments, much like modern HR departments, are more about preventing the company’s image from being tarnished than about what you might think their job description might be. They are servants of the corporation, looking out for its best interests, not the employees. In many ways, they are the foxes guarding the henhouse.

 

I also knew that while the EEOC had strong legal mandate regarding discrimination, it had limited reach and powerful political enemies even after it had been revitalized by the then current Administration. Finding their contact information was a bit trickier as I recall.

 

With that in mind, I chose an uncharacteristic path. I embraced my inner Niccolò Machiavelli’s and heeded his advice, from Discourses not The Prince.

 

People who know me know that I have a complex, ambiguous and sometimes ambivalent relationship with Machiavelli. On the one hand, his words have been used to propel any number of despots into power. On the other, he captures a great deal of truth in the way people interact politically. Having played enough of the Avalon Hill game that bears his name, as I’ve mentioned in other essays, I had an idea how to use his principles for good. I see them as a tool, not inherently good or evil.

 

My plan was simple. I would outline my ethical and legal concerns over our corporate policy in a professionally crafted letter, using all the communications skills I’d picked up to make the arguments for my case. I would send it to both relevant parties, our ethics office and the EEOC. Since I was dealing with two weak allies with suspect individual motivations, I opted for a strategy that would force an alliance between them, much like I’d seen used quite effectively in the Machiavelli game.

 

Not only would I send the letter to both parties, I would clearly mark each as having been cc’d to the other. Which meant it would be more difficult for either to bury the incident for fear the other would act and blame them for not acting, thus exploiting their mutual antagonism. At the time, any ethics complaint involving a federal contract was required to be forwarded to the government. That did not always happen. Or if it did, the issue was often buried.

 

The thing is, if I believe in something, I don’t mind signing my John Hancock, despite the potential consequences. I don’t mind making a stand and have made more than a few unpopular ones. I don’t mind going toe-to-toe when necessary. I understand there are times you have to die on that hill just to protest, just to make a statement. Because sometimes by losing now, you can win later. You don’t do it capriciously, but there can be a long-term strategy at play.

 

Winning and losing are only words that reflect personal investment. My only real goal was to get the policy changed and give these women the same opportunity I had, to rise or fall on their own abilities, not their gender. An equal opportunity you might say.

 

But I knew I was dealing with some petty, vindictive people in my chain of command. If they were willing to threaten reprisals at highest levels over a bond drive, I had a pretty good idea of what they might be willing to do here. Which meant my letters would go unsigned. That rubbed my personal ethics wrong, primarily because I believed in what I was doing.

 

There was an advantage in anonymity. If corporate could ID who had complained, they could attack the individual (with rumors or reprisals). Without knowing who it was, they could only attack the ideas. As well, if that anonymity held, they would be more likely to hesitate in the future because that whistleblower could still be lurking. Those advantages outweighed any reputation I had at that moment, which honestly wasn’t much. As squeamish as I was, and as dishonorable as it felt, I had to the let the ends justify the means.

 

You may remember from Leadership that I value actions over words. In the end, I value actions over credit though credit can be nice. Effort matters but results matter more. I won’t die on hills for glory or recognition. I will die for results. It doesn’t do anyone any good to be martyred. Any martyrdom complexes I may have harbored were long dead, killed by practical experience. I intended to continue fighting for what I saw as important. Like this.

 

The risk was that the blame might fall on the women themselves and make their lives more miserable. Were that to happen, I planned to come forward before they could take the fall. I had to trust my instincts that the culture had begun to change. And that I could engage in round two if round one didn’t result in a KO, mine. To keep fighting, you have to survive.

 

And I very much intended to survive.

 

So, I let my native paranoia take the wheel. I didn’t compose my letter on a work computer, or even the laptop I rarely took to work. I wrote it with a different style, different words and a different voice. I didn’t put a return address on the envelopes that I ensured were typed, not hand addressed. I mailed both through a company drop box that went through the mailroom to the post office rather than dropping them where they might get a defining postmark, like say in Seminole. I stopped short of wearing gloves.

 

I told no one what I was doing except my wife, then fiancée, who I swore to secrecy. I trusted her implicitly. She supported my decision. We both held clearances, which if nothing else teaches you how to keep a secret.

 

I buried those two letters in different corporate mail drops, each in stacks of other envelopes of interdepartmental, corporate and personal mail. That was a risk, but so is tampering with stamped and addressed US Mail. Not that they should have been able to ID exactly where either came from. When I was finished, I deleted the files from my home computer.

 

Once I released those letters, I treated them like fire-and-forget weapons. Don’t linger in the area. Fire and move.

 

I wasn’t certain my actions would do much more than serve as a protest to be honest. I figured in the way of the world, no one would take my complaint very seriously. Management was more likely to find a reason not to act than to change the course they’d chosen.

 

Imagine my surprise a week later when I arrived at work and found the building already abuzz. I asked one of my friends what was going on. One of my female friends. She said word had come down from on high revoking the gender-based fieldwork rules. The women were now on the exact same footing as the men.

 

I quickly dropped a stony poker face in place. The eyes that look right through you, as I’d been told. Oh, I said.

 

Then she lowered her voice conspiratorially and looked around. Her contact higher up said that someone had complained anonymously and everyone in management from our divisional VP down was livid. Another of her contacts said there were management meetings all over the building trying to ferret out who it was.

 

Huh, I replied, then headed to my cube. I just went about my day, pleased my plan had worked better than expected, trying not to let it show.

 

Another friend in a different department who was in some of those meetings later confirmed that management was actively hunting for the whistleblower. They desperately wanted a head to roll to serve as an example. They never claimed one.

 

No one ever asked me about the incident. No one ever leveled an accusation against me or anyone else, at least that I know of. If management suspected me, I never heard.

 

I don’t believe they did as a few years later, I received a divisional excellence award for Development (for a different “accomplishment”), about the time I was slated to lead two dozen engineers on three teams (predominately of our female engineers) with a multi-million-dollar budget. I RSVP’d that I wouldn’t be able to attend to the dinner ceremony where the award would be presented by that same divisional VP. Instead, I had to go to HR to pick it up the Monday after. They didn’t realize that by that point I was beyond caring. I’d seen enough. I was already on my way out the door.

 

Before today, I’ve only shared this incident with a handful of people. With the exception of my wife, that happened only once, twenty years later at a Kitten*Con as we were discussing gender bias after the wine and cognac had flowed. I am still not entirely sure why I chose to share it at that moment. Maybe it was after a lecture on feminism in science fiction. Maybe after a discussion of the Bechdel Test (wiki it). I guess I trusted the people I was with. Although I could see little harm coming of it by then, I’d just gotten used to keeping that secret to myself.

 

So why reveal it now? Why bring it up again?

 

Perhaps because I’ve been thinking about that incident a lot recently. It is one of the few clean victories I can claim in my life, even if unattributed. A small victory which gained more meaning as time went by and other conflicts in my life have drawn to more ambiguous closures.

 

Perhaps because I feel we’ve been slipping backwards, that hard won progress has been eroded in recent years as old attitudes not only have resurfaced but are now rewarded. And likely will be again in the near future. The authoritarian, Q-Anon, Proud Boy opposition isn’t playing at their goals. Or rather they’re playing for keeps. Social progress, unlike technological advances, are often cyclic. While it’s rare for society to set aside a new technology, that is by no means true for civil rights.

 

And perhaps because I feel I’m getting too old to fight. Or I feel I’ve spent too much time fighting. I am tired and don’t know how much practical fight I have left in me. Perhaps I just hope someone else will take up the torch, using all the tools they are given, and leverage them to get the job done. If my experience serves as a guide or an inspiration, all the better. Or perhaps I am just reminding myself that I once knew how to fight and will again if necessary.

 

Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.

 

As we approach the day of deepest darkness, we may do well to reflect on the light we bring to this world. Sometimes you need place that lamp high on a pedestal for all to see. And sometimes concealing it beneath a bushel basket, or in a cellar to light a stop on an underground network, is much more effective.

 

Often you will never know how others perceive the path you light. If the right light guides you, you don’t need to. Even if, within the framework of the greater good, you sometimes compromise your personal code and allow more ethical ends to justify your means.

 

 

© 2021 Edward P. Morgan III

Aftermath – Winter Solstice 2020

 

Some of my friends have tattoos to remind them of significant chapters in their life stories. I have scars.

 

I am not talking about the kind of scars we all pick up through accident, injury or misfortune. I am talking about the four I laid down myself in neat, straight, parallel lines, first three then one. The set that look like a wildcat raked my forearm with razor sharp claws.

 

In previous essays, I’ve alluded to these scars and what they stand for. The closing essay of this very strange year seems like a good time to tell the rest of the story.

 

As people who read “Switching Sides” may remember, twenty-nine years ago I was deeply questioning my life choices. I had just finished a two-year tour of hell where I worked (Mr. Wizard, I don’t want to be an engineer anymore). Even after that environment had finally calmed down, things weren’t working out quite as I’d hoped. Most of my friends had picked up and moved to Seattle without warning. None were much interested in helping me find a job out there so I might join them. I needed to figure out what I wanted to do and where I wanted to go.

 

So, I decided to embark on a vision quest.

 

The week of Thanksgiving that year, I scheduled vacation so I could head into the mountains of North Carolina. When I was a teenager, I had begun a personal tradition of going camping the first weekend it got cold. Cold in Florida meant lows in the 40s. But that year, I really wanted to go somewhere more remote. I’d been to the North Carolina mountains several times by then, first on a family vacation when I was under ten, then for two weeks at a Boy Scout camp when I was a young teen, and again on a hiking and camping weekend with friends five or six years later.

 

I love the mountains, whether the Carolinas, Virginia, Vermont, or the Olympic National Forest. Something about the esthetic of wood, water and stone resonates with my soul. Perhaps my Abenaki heritage shining through. For me, they are a perfect place to retreat and reflect.

 

From my North Carolina travel atlas, I picked out a camping area in a national forest with an intriguing name: Hanging Dog. It was right outside a town named Murphy in the far southwest corner of the state. Karen and I had done a driving tour through that area and adjoining Tennessee the year before. So, I packed up my camping gear in the Jeep and headed north. I planned to stay up there for several days, hoping to get back before Thanksgiving Day. Having never before undertaken a vision quest and having no training, I had no idea how long it might take.

 

My plan was simple. The first part of most vision quests involves a fast. The drive to Hanging Dog would take twelve or so hours. I figured if I ate a decent breakfast on my way out of town that my time on the road would be a good jumpstart on that portion of the ritual. I brought rations up with me, knowing that driving back while still fasting after possibly several days would be an insanely bad idea.

 

When I got there that night, the campground was almost abandoned. I think there was one other person there. I chose a campsite as far away from him as I could get. Something I didn’t know until I was unloading the Jeep was that the park had designated, bordered areas filled with chipped gravel where you were required to setup your tent. Because it was dark when I arrived, I didn’t have time to gather pine needles to insulate and cushion my sleeping area. Which made for a very cold and somewhat uncomfortable night. As I remember, the temperatures dropped into the lower teens. The daytime highs were just above freezing. Normally not a problem. I own decent equipment and have more than a little experience.

 

But funny thing: when you don’t eat, your body doesn’t have fuel to generate heat. Which meant when I woke up the first morning, I couldn’t feel my feet. Very literally, everything below my ankles was numb, as if encased in ice. It took several minutes stomping and walking around in boots before they warmed enough to recover sensation. Even keeping a fire and wearing wool socks inside my sleeping bag the next night didn’t make much difference.

 

None of that mattered. Cold went with hungry as part of the ordeal.

 

I spent most of my days hiking around the area, exploring the shore of a lake that had been flooded as a part of a TVA dam project. Mostly, I just poked within a mile or so of my campsite, understanding it might not be the best time to get lost out in the wilderness. At some point I stumbled across graveyard with headstones that predated the Civil War, which I was pretty sure had been moved up from the valley floor when the lake was flooded. This place felt old with human habitation although the mountains in this area were still sparsely populated.

 

I found I had a lot more time on my hands than normal. It might surprise some of you how much time camping is spent in food preparation, between tending a fire, cooking and cleaning up. Usually two hot meals a day, at least in winter, breakfast and dinner. Without that chore, I suddenly had a fair bit of unoccupied time to think and meditate alone. Which was pretty much the point of the exercise.

 

With nothing else to distract you, you really begin to understand what hunger feels like. That dull ache becomes a sharp sensation when you know food is stashed a few feet away in your vehicle. By the second day, that taunting becomes torture. Except by then, you have a hard time focusing on it. Or really much of anything else.

 

But at its heart, the quest is about sacrifice, hoping it will be rewarded with a vision. Even with the cold and hunger, I knew hadn’t offered enough. I knew I needed something to hone my focus away from that privation. While I wasn’t familiar with Abenaki traditions specifically, with many native people’s that meant an offering of blood.

 

I hadn’t really thought about that part too much but I remembered the Sun Dance of many Plains peoples, which both the Canadian and US governments had outlawed in the nineteenth century. Some stories told of warriors who hung buffalo skulls from rawhide strips laced beneath the skin of their chest before they danced, sometimes for several days. I wasn’t quite ready for that level of commitment. Besides, I didn’t have a ready supply of rawhide or skulls on hand. Possibly poor planning on my part.

 

And yet, the more I meditated, the more it came clear to me that I needed to lay down a similar, if minor, sacrifice to demonstrate my resolve. So, on the third day I took out my razor-sharp belt knife and carved three parallel cuts high on my left forearm. I ensured the cuts were deep enough to transcend all the layers skin but not so deep as to expose muscle or tendon. Even with a sharp knife, that required effort and determination. When I was finished, I let them bleed a bit to help clean the wounds. Then I wrapped them in a cotton handkerchief as a bandage and tied it tightly.

 

And I waited.

 

I thought a lot about my current dissatisfaction and whether it was just ennui. I thought about the incidents in my background and how those jigsaw lines had helped craft the puzzle of who I was. I thought about the choices I’d made that had led me there, and whether I had truly made them for myself or for someone else. I thought about where I wanted to be and where my talents might take me. I thought about what I valued in this life and the things that brought me joy. I thought about the sacrifices that might be necessary to attain the life I’d envisioned.

 

Eventually the cold and hunger and throbbing ache in my arm did what I’d asked of them. I won’t go into details, but that night I got what I had asked for, though perhaps not as dramatically as I’d expected. It was more of a strong feeling of a path forward than an outright vision. But I knew it was all that would be forthcoming. When I finally broke my fast the next morning in preparation to drive home, I had a plan and a vague timeline. The plan that eventually led me to where I am today.

 

Why three cuts? At the time I didn’t know. It felt like the right number. As I thought about them on the drive back, I thought they might symbolize something different. It wasn’t until I was home and fully fed that I recognized what they truly represented.

 

When I was maybe seventeen, my father shared a story with me that I had never heard before. He was annoyed with me for something about my mother, likely for repeating something she’d said or for defending her in some way. Neither of my parents was above using my sister or me as pawns or weapons to settle scores over their longstanding grievances.

 

At any rate, sitting at the table in the breakfast nook of my father’s condo, he proceeded to tell me how on the eve of my kindergarten graduation, my mother had beaten me so badly that my head swelled up. He didn’t say what spawned this, only that when he had got home from work afterwards my mother insisted that we couldn’t go to the graduation ceremony because everyone would see what she had done. As he told the tale, he said to her, “You’re goddamned right they’ll see, Sally. Because we’re going.” And apparently, we did.

 

I don’t remember the beating. I’ve been told I likely blocked it out, which may have been a blessing, although it does leave a disconcerting hole in my developmental history. I do have a memory of something that may have prompted it, me accidentally breaking my father’s favorite liquor bottle in our front hall closet. My mother forced me to call him at work to tell him, which at the time simply wasn’t done. I was incomprehensible from terror on the phone. I didn’t fear his reaction; I feared my mother’s rage. I can’t say with any certainty that this was the incident that prompted his story. But I do have a vague recollection of that kindergarten graduation ceremony, of tottering down the aisle as ecstatic at being there as only a little kid can be.

 

That gave his story at least some credibility with me. But as I said in "Choices” earlier this year, I am an applied scientist at heart. From hard won experience, I look for evidence to confirm or refute what I’ve been told. That comes from growing up in an unstable, sometimes Machiavellian environment. Trust nothing you can’t verify. Everyone has an agenda.

 

The thing is, I never caught my father in an outright lie. My mother plenty of times. Her memory seemed completely malleable to her desire. But my father, no.

 

A year or two before this story, he had told me about my mother’s suicide attempt when I was still a toddler, where she slit her wrists during an argument sitting in the driveway of our house. He said this was just a cry for attention (exactly how he would have seen it). He said that because she was a nurse, she knew exactly how to open her veins if she had been serious. I was pretty dubious when he told me that story. But when I surreptitiously looked at my mother’s wrists at some point later, I spied very thin white scars transecting each. Not deep. When I asked her about them, she refused to answer.

 

By then, I had also heard and confirmed that when my parents were getting divorced, my father’s two sisters were ready to stand up in court to ensure he got custody. Or if not him, one of them. In 1974, that meant proving my mother was unfit as a parent. My aunts were fully willing to go to bat to get my sister and I removed from her care one way or another. My father was not. And without his support, nothing could happen. So nothing did.

 

From other things my father said to me much later, he and my mother never should have been married. His heart was never in the marriage or the family it spawned. He thought it was all a societal expectation. He fully believed he had been forced into it (he wasn’t). He certainly made clear to me before he died that I was not the son he wanted, the one he could drink and carouse with. “If you’d been a better kid, maybe I would have done more to help you.”

 

But that quote came more than a decade after this story, which is a story of its own.

 

At the point he shared the story of the beating with me, all I had was his account, supported by all the other incidents I remembered (and I have written about in poetry and a host of essays, including some from this year and last). While I can’t fully attest to exactly what happened in his story, the things I do remember resonate with it as likely truth.

 

Like my sleeping on an unset collarbone that I’d broken while hill-siliding one afternoon when I was eight or nine until my father ordered her to take me to a doctor the next morning. Or her throwing everything my sister and I owned into the middle of the floors of our rooms at least twice around the same time.

 

My mother was volatile and sometimes violent.

 

Taken as a whole, I knew there was something desperately wrong in my family. Things I was still sorting out. Certainly not as wrong as in some other people’s but wrong enough.

 

When I’d headed to the mountains that year, the aftermath of all those events was slowly filtering into place in my now fully-developed adult brain. Sometime after I’d returned with my soon to be scars, I realized I’d laid down three to represent the members of my immediate family: the one who abused me, the one who tried to kill me, and the one who left me to survive the other two. A few years later I added a fourth for Karen’s brother, the one who raped the one I love.

 

It was only after that mark of Bast was complete that I fully understood exactly why I’d crafted it. I needed a physical scar, something I could see and point to, to show that I’d been through something meaningful and survived. Something all four individuals denied or deflected each in different ways. All four of whom remain unrepentant, two until their deaths. I have no real hope for an epiphany from the other two. Nor am I holding my breath.

 

Yeah, kind of messed up but there it is. Psych 101 in all its glory.

 

And yet, seeing those scars every day has helped me, if only to remember, if only not to be gaslighted by what others deny that I recall. Generally, I am the only one who sees them other than my wife. Fortunately, I always wore long sleeves at work so they rarely drew much attention while they were still bold and angry red. I think only one friend ever asked me about them. Maybe a handful of medical professionals when I’ve had to roll up a sleeve. When asked, I usually say I that got them while camping when I was younger, which is absolutely true. I don’t often feel the need to explain. They weren’t meant for anyone but me.

 

From the aftermath of my childhood experiences, I’ve learned that sometimes you have to lay wounds bare to allow them to fully heal. Sometimes that’s the only real way to acknowledge something and leave it behind, which at the time I created them was something I had just started to do. To get where I was going, I had to find a way to acknowledge what had happened, how it impacted me, and leave the worst of it behind. To live for the future, not the past. At least as much as any of us ever can.

 

I am sure no therapist would recommend my particular method but the principle is sound.

 

I’ve thought about those scars a lot during the past four years. I see millions of people in the same position I was in, having survived something extraordinary and sometimes existential that was beyond their control, something often times denied. Millions will bear scars from this failed experiment of an Administration, some full tangible, others invisible. Hundreds if not thousands of children punitively caged away from their parents (who ICE and DHS now claim they cannot find). The relatives of tens of thousands who needless died in a mismanaged pandemic. Tens of thousands more federal employees whose service and oaths to this country and its Constitution have been denigrated. Tens of thousands whose marriages are now threatened with being invalidated. And countless others who continue to suffer from the rabid racism, sexism and homophobia that is not only back in the open but is increasingly back in vogue.

 

A new Administration cannot cure these ills. An election is only palliative. The hard work comes after, should it not be obstructed and stillborn as before. To recover, I believe we require hard reflection, truth and reconciliation. I fear that is unlikely to happen in the current climate.

 

Should we choose not to expose the wounds fully and allow them to heal, in my experience we will continue down a very dangerous path. One we have seen and continue to see of undermining the foundations and institutions critical to the survival of our democracy, a free press, free and fair elections, the rule of law, a peaceful transition of power, regard for science expertise. Instead, we’ve heard hypocrisy, orchestrated lies, propaganda, calls to violence, calls to suspend the Constitution, and a cabinet meeting where declaring martial law to rerun the election was discussed. With silence that echoes complicity.

 

This is not how a healthy democracy survives.

 

The night of the election, I woke up in the early hours of the morning with my heart pounding so savagely that I was afraid I would hear it stop. I had a disorienting feeling like I had done something wrong, just like I had when I was a kid, even though I knew I hadn’t, now as then. Just like four years earlier. Only this time, over the next four days, things turned around as all the legal votes were finally counted and all the claims of massive fraud debunked.

 

Around that time, once again in the middle of the night, I accessed that vision quest from so long ago and felt something I haven’t felt in a very long time. As our resident coyotes raised their voices just across the ditch from our sliding glass door, those scars flared back to life and I once again tapped into their power. The power that saw me write this essay faster than any other this year. The power of knowing I had survived. Again.

 

That calmed me in a way I cannot fully put in words. Once again, I found myself looking forward not back.

 

When I started this year’s essays, it was with the expressed purpose of reflecting on the past four years. Not to dwell on them, rather to influence people, if only by providing some insight that might make them think. Because I saw a stark choice that stood before us.

 

Five years ago, I swore to myself I would never again use my memories as the basis for essays. At the time, I thought they had become too bound up in other people’s entertainment which somehow felt wrong and unhelpful. So, I stopped writing them.

 

I changed my mind this year because the situation I saw unfolding was too important for me to let my own discomfort stand in the way of doing what I thought was right, even if it meant lacing my flesh with new, unseen scars. I was too disconcerted by what I’d seen unfold for four full years. I valued what I knew needed change too much.

 

Despite my desire, I doubt I accomplished much other than revealing a few more difficult experiences in my life. Most of the essays were painful to write because they were painful to relive. Although I have gotten a handful of emphatic thank yous, there have been more awkward silences, some defensive commentary, a few stunningly insensitive statements, and a little mocking of what I see and believe. I knew all that was likely walking in, but am still somewhat disappointed. I can only hope my words have helped someone reading them along the way, whether to consider a new perspective or just to understand on some deeper level that they were not alone.

 

Either way, it’s time to lay aside these burdens as we prepare to set fire to the candles to mark the Winter Solstice. With their light we defy this longest night along with all the tragedy and suffering the year has wrought. Knowing in our hearts that our days will only get brighter from here as we resolutely march toward spring.

 

 

© 2020 Edward P. Morgan III

Chance and Community Chest - Charity

When I was in college, whenever I had extra money, I’d fold up a bill into a little square, a $20 or a $5, and hide it in my wallet. When I was short on money, I would sometimes find my little cache which provided a nice bonus to tide me over to the next cash infusion. I still remember the rush of surprise finding that bill tucked deep into a corner of my wallet. Like past me had bequeathed future me a gift, for which I was always grateful. And I always tried to pay that money forward when I had it to the next impoverished me, as well as share with those around me when I could.

The gift economy was an important part of my college career. As I said earlier, my grandmother gave each of her grandchildren in college a small annual gift as spending money. She had gone to college in a time when it wasn’t common for women so she knew from experience how much that meant. I was always grateful, as I was for any gift certificates I received. My aunt, a librarian, usually gave me one to a favorite bookstore for my birthday. The four or five novels a year it allowed me to buy were invaluable to me.

Reading these essays, you might be under the mistaken impression that we think that we bootstrapped this all by ourselves. We did not. As I said in the first essay, we have been very fortunate. We have received gifts and inheritances. What we might have done differently than other people was that we put most of that found money to work rather than splurging on ourselves.

We didn’t create this little bubble universe we live in from whole cloth, but we did tailor it to our tastes.

When I was younger, I had the naïve philosophy, based on scattershot experience, that money would come to me when I needed it. Not when I wanted it, when I really needed it. I remember so many times in college having unforeseen gifts or bonuses or found money I’d squirreled away save me from a repair bill on my car or allowing me to pick up an extra book I didn’t know I needed for a class.

Oddly, while I believed in it, I never relied on it. I also had the firm New England Congregationalist philosophy that the gods help those who help themselves. I was never fully willing to commit my destiny to random chance though sometimes that random chance favored me.

And sometimes it didn’t. The Greeks were right: the gods are as capricious as a teenage girl shopping in the mall with a purse full of hand grenades.

But I also believed, and still do, that if you give back where you can, the universe is a little more likely to turn a kind eye upon you. Maybe that’s just some primitive, animistic sociology.

Over the years, we have contributed to charities, organizations and individuals. In the past few years, our gifts have gone directly to individuals in need to avoid the overhead of organized administration. Those have generally been special circumstances we don’t much discuss for a variety of reasons.

I’m not here to talk about that. You all have your favorite charities and ways you contribute to them that work for you.

If there is a theme to this series of essays so far, it is the proverb, “Waste not, want not.” I know, I’m supposed to be a writer. How utterly cliché.

For many people I’ve known, that proverb translates into hoarding everything they’ve collected in their lives and not being able to part with any of it because one day they might want it (“File it under ‘I’ for I might need that someday”). Most people I’ve met have a hard time letting physical items go. Cleaning out their closets is a struggle of blood, sweat, toil and tears, often quite literally. Somehow, they get bound up emotionally with the circumstances of how they acquired whatever it is they hold in their hands.

For whatever reason, I am not generally cursed with that psychic entanglement. Perhaps in part this comes back to my belief in the power of simplicity.

Other people I know incorporate that adage by selling any of their excess existential largesse secondhand. I would never advise against it for someone who needs the money and has the time. For us, and many others, that often just becomes an excuse to defer and delay. We have chosen a different path.

About twenty years ago, we noticed that our closets, cabinets and cupboards had gotten full, mostly with detritus we’d collected over the years. In Florida, we are not blessed with attics and basements to store life’s excess bounty, most of which we never looked at or used but somehow couldn’t part with.

Once upon a time, moving on a regular basis provided the perfect opportunity for winnowing. Often what we could carry with us was enforced by the size of the car we drove, the truck we could rent, or the number of friends we could feed to move it all with us. Once we nested in the same location for ten or more years, those enforced opportunities vanished. And the detritus accreted into a kind of historical sedimentary rock. In the deepest closets, it seemed to be on its way to metamorphizing.

For a long time, I’ve had the philosophy that I needed clear pathways to move through my home. My general rule is that I should be able to place my clenched fists against each other at my solar plexus and still be able to navigate the house without hitting my elbows, which for me is just about the width of an open doorway. As well, I’ve found my mind functions better when everything around me is neat, clear and organized.

Our clutter hadn’t yet overflowed into the walkways, though some furniture we’d acquired in our early post-college days was somewhat awkwardly placed.

So, over the course of a staycation, we went room by room, collecting all the things we no longer used. I took a brutal eye to everything I touched. Need, want, nice-to-have transformed into used frequently, rarely or not at all. Was anything worn, damaged or obsolete? Were the items with sentiment attached to them truly irreplaceable or just associated with well-worn memories that would never go away? Were we ever going to get around to that deferred project or repair? How many were impulse buys I never should have made?

Nothing in the house went untouched except the cats. And even their toy box got raided.

I became like Genghis Khan on a mission, slashing and burning everything in sight. My decisions were instantaneous and brutal. I entered a fugue state. By the time I reawakened, we’d filled up half a bay in the garage. Who knew we could stash away so much stuff in what wasn’t really an overly large house with a dearth of closets?

That stash sat in the garage for a bit while we decided what to do with it. A few items got hauled back in, a few others that had been on the fence went out. But 95% of it stayed exactly where it was.

In the end, we donated everything still functional to a no-kill pet shelter than ran a thrift store to fund its operations. Anything they wouldn’t take that was still useful went to Goodwill. The books, DVDs and CDs, we gave to the public library which runs their own bookstore to supplement their acquisition budget. Anything that wasn’t useful got set out at the curb. Some of it disappeared before the trash guys came around, either as metal recycling or someone else’s reclamation project.

The funny thing was, when we were done, we felt both exhausted yet lighter. When we walked around the house it was like the scales of our existence had fallen from our eyes. We noticed the things we’d kept and appreciated even more because there was less to clutter up our view. We quickly found didn’t need or miss the excess.

Now we do this every year. While we never filled up that large a space again, in the earlier years we generated more than we thought could still exist. Things we couldn’t part with one year were often easily let go the next. Our goal was to move out more than we brought in.

For us giving all those unwanted items to charity made it easier as we could envision our island of misfit toys making someone else a little happier and benefiting an organization we believed in along the way. Win-win-win.

That belief and visualization meant we could clear out faster, let more go and move on with our lives while hauling around less baggage. Like a caged bird scenario, I sometimes believe that if the universe really wants me to have something, it will come back to me. I know that sounds a little metaphysical, but it works for me. In the intervening time, 99% of what we let go, I haven’t missed. Of the hundreds of items I’ve given away, I can count on one hand the ones I remember and regret.

There’s an interesting psychological principle at work here. People, in general, feel better with less clutter. In both children and adults, studies have shown that the fewer choices an individual has when making a decision, the happier they are. Fewer, not none (3-7 is optimal). Too many choices, whether in entertainment or available flavors of jam, tend to paralyze us in indecision rather than liberate us.

Of course, there is also an evolutionary principle pitted against that. Most people can’t let things go because they are convinced that they might want them again in the future and not be able to find them. We are wired not to pass up resources even if we don’t need them at the moment.

For most people, finding the balance can be difficult. I am probably blessed in that, for me, it’s not. I often ask myself, how many pairs of shoes can I wear? How many dress shirts do I need? How many cars can I drive? The list goes on. I find it to be a useful exercise.

Uncluttering our lives meant we could more easily see our goal. We could rule our stuff rather than our stuff ruling us. Simplicity multiplied in having less maintenance to do on existing items, along with less stress over doing it or losing them. And less cleaning. All of which freed up more time to do the things we wanted or thought were important. It also freed up living space. Donating our excess to charity paid dividends for us. It was always an integral part of the process.

Give back in ways large and small and the universe will give back to you. I fundamentally believe that no matter how it strange it sounds. Some of that reflects back to the Three Treasures of Taoism: Charity, Simplicity and Humility.

Some of this philosophy has extended down to my writing career.

Back in the 90s, I frequented a Taoist internet forum. I have been fascinated with the philosophy since college and enjoyed reading insights and interacting with similar people there for years.

Slowly but inevitably, the site became unstable. Christian evangelicals decided to colonize our forum from their sister site, first under the auspices of understanding which quickly transformed into proselytization and finally into open warfare. In case you don’t know many Taoists and Zen Buddhists (who preferred our company to the predominately Theravada Buddhists who frequented their forum), this is a neat trick to pull off. Somehow, we allowed it to happen.

Anyway, sometime after 9/11, the individual who ran the forum shut it down, due to those and other issues. A couple daughter sites sprang up run by former members. I frequented one of those for a little while. There I ended up in a discussion with a woman I didn’t know about creative works and people who were poor.

At the time, the music sharing controversy was still running at full steam. The free economy hadn’t yet transformed into the gig economy in the wake of the Great Recession. The mantra that information wants to be free had just begun to echo, along with all the implications of that on anyone who held a copyright (which were seen in these circles as the stamp of ownership by the corporate beast).

Which was pretty much the direction I saw this conversation headed as it unfolded, which didn’t sit well with me.

I’ve known people who make their living from the sweat of their creativity. Not the big, splashy names that in music had the backing of major labels, but smaller indie names most people had never heard of. People who write their own songs, print and market their own CDs, setup and tear down their own equipment and loaded it into the van they drive to the next gig themselves. People who if they sold a thousand CDs at an appearance were having a really good night. People with mortgages and bills to pay, struggling to keep a fingerhold on the lowest ledge of the middle class. People who earned their money.

The equivalent description applies to the vast majority of writers I’ve met, most of whom will never be Stephen King.

Anyway, I got the sense that this woman was mostly self-rationalizing her own behavior of taking works to enjoy rather than paying the artist their due so they could keep creating (like many others I’ve met). And I said as much.

But still, I listened. Because, as I mentioned in other essays, I’ve known people who lived in poverty. I have more than an inkling of what their lives can be like.

And something in that conversation must have resonated. Because just after I started Noddfa Imaginings, when the Great Recession struck, I decided that I would give back to people by not charging them to read what I created. By then, I easily could have, at least the better stories. Self-publishing was not a difficult process. It still isn’t.

I’ve known the numbers of this business since the beginning. When I left engineering, the average advance on a first science fiction novel was $2-3k. A novel generally takes a year to write. You can do the math. And that was before the publishing industry started into full collapse, though it’s stabilized to some extent since. 

I’ve told people all along that getting published, while a nice indicator of success, wasn’t essential for me. I didn’t need the money. This decision seemed like a natural extension of that principle at the time.

Even as the economy has recovered, I haven’t gone back on it, though I do sometimes reconsider. Perhaps that just means I am still looking for some external validation. Most writers or creative types aren’t in that position. There is a persuasive argument to be made that giving away works for free devalues not just the works but the artists. Though I suspect art endures not for payment but for its own sake. At the same time, it’s nice to be able to eat. The starving artist stereotype is a trope that’s been way overplayed.

Setting up a lifestyle where I could afford to make that decision started with living debt-free by paying off the house. I understood the implications of compound interest, both positive and negative depending on which side of the equation we were on.

I am guessing some of you are wondering how any of this essay relates to the others. That’s easy. There is a point when enough is enough. I don’t need more stuff I’ll never use. Which means I don’t need a bigger house to store it all in, or a bigger car to haul it all around. Which means I don’t need a high paying job to maintain it all.

As well, for me, it was always about remembering the initial goal, not fixating on the process. Our goal was financial independence, living a dream and retiring early so we could do the things we enjoy. Which has never been to have bigger, better or shinier toys than anyone else. It was never about having more. It was never a contest or a race.

As I’ve said, I don’t spend as much time managing our finances as people might think. I could spend a great deal more time min-max each decision and investment for the highest return. I’m not sure what the purpose of that would be. My goal was to be a writer (“Dammit, Jim, I’m a wordsmith, not a hedge fund manager!”). But I do have an affinity for numbers and a certain intuitive predisposition to working them.

One final story. When we made an offer on the house, I already had a handle on the compound interest tables I’ve mentioned. We really wanted the house, but it fell just outside our price range. We knew it had been on the market for a while and had dropped in price once or twice because the housing market had softened. So, I ran some numbers and came up with a strategy.

First, I looked at what the owners had paid for the house five years earlier, which was in the paperwork of the listing. I subtracted off a 10% down payment, which was standard at the time. Knowing roughly what the interest rates were five years before, I calculated what they still owed. I then added in a rough estimate of their selling commissions and fees, and compared that number to what they were asking which was significantly more. I took the difference, subtracted it off of what they needed to break even and said that should be our offer.

Karen was dubious about my strategy. She really, really wanted this house. So did I. But once I explained the numbers and the psychology to her, she agreed to go along. We submitted our offer and gave them 24 hours to reply, knowing full well it would be rejected. But we didn’t want to give them time to think.

I was counting on, and received, a counter-offer, also with a 24-hour ticking clock. What I anticipated was a back and forth that would end somewhere south of the asking price, hopefully near the midpoint. What I got was a final price with a caveat that it was take-or-leave. The number? Within $1000 of the exact number I’d calculated they needed to break even. We didn’t pause when we heard it, just said we’d take it which I think surprised everyone involved.

As I said at near the beginning, knowledge is power. That calculation shaved roughly 12% off the asking price, putting it back on the border of our initial budget. After all these essays, that number should ring a bell. I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader to determine how much interest that might have saved had we paid the mortgage to completion. Of course, we took a risk, but that risk rested on solid calculations and psychology. It paid off.

And if it hadn’t? I’m sure we would have found another house, one we’d be just as happy with today.

I know I am fortunate. I have always been goal-oriented. A disciplined mindset is a part of my personality. Because of my engineering background, things like tracking expenses in a backward-looking budget come naturally to me. I was exposed to the people who could explain the power of compound interest and the power of paying down debt. My experience told me to never pass up an opportunity or a discount, at least a real one. Planning and organizing are second nature, as is trying to repair or maintain what I have. Spotting opportunities in the market is mostly intuitive. Letting go of things so that others may benefit from them does not cause me existential pain.

I was doubly-fortunate that I had a spouse who encouraged me and was willing to follow where I led even when our lives became uncertain, knowing all this experience gives us a huge leg up now that she’s retired. We’ve been through all the major decisions and planning sequences before, though not all the variations and subtleties on the theme. And we’ve picked up a few tricks and tips in case things slip sideways.

Hopefully, now, you have, too.

I started this process with a goal. I wanted to become a writer. But my overdeveloped sense of responsibility said I couldn’t just dive into the pond without mapping out the waters. So, I came up with a plan. I crafted a budget and tested it against the way we live. I adapted my mindset. I paid off my debts. I changed my lifestyle, my accustomed manner of living. I invested, not just for my future but for our futures. And with perhaps an equal mixture of skill and luck, it paid long-term dividends, some of which should last for the foreseeable future.

Planning, patience, simplicity and discipline. For us, that’s what financial independence is all about. It’s how I’ve been able to live the dream of writing for over twenty years.

Now, some of you might be thinking that I benefited from all this more than Karen. After all, writing was my dream, not hers. She was the one still working.

A few points to consider. First, this was always a path she encouraged me to take, sometimes quite vigorously before we even had a plan. Second, it was my excess salary, which until quite recently was still higher than hers, that put us in this position. Third, as I said early on, ideally before executing this plan, I would have found another job in engineering elsewhere in the country, likely in the Pacific NW. She didn’t want to leave her job here or move that far. And finally, while we make joint decisions, it is my planning, research and financial stewardship that sees us through each year.

When Karen had the opportunity to retire early last year, she chose not to take it because she still enjoyed her job. Her longstanding dream was to be a geologist studying hurricanes and coastlines with the USGS. Sometime between then and now, that changed. She retired in August after 30 years of Federal service that she likely wouldn’t have reached had I stayed in engineering. The locations of my best jobs and hers didn’t coincide. She got to live her dream, too.

In short, we have both contributed to and benefited from this path. Your mileage may vary.

But the reality is this: Many people with different talents, proclivities and predispositions can do what we’ve done. Some of you already have, perhaps even better. I would never say ours is the only way or even the best way. It is just one way. Many paths, one mountain.

Which brings me full circle to something I said in the very first essay. Part of the reason I wrote this series was to give back, or perhaps to pay my good fortune forward like that folded bill tucked inside my wallet. If anything in these essays helps even one person get a single step closer to their dream or goal, that’s reward enough for me. But all I can do is help and maybe guide through example. The rest is up to you.

The thousand-mile road begins beneath your feet. Godspeed and safe journey.

© 2019 Edward P. Morgan III