getting ahead

 Where is everybody?  I don't mind entertaining you guys but I would like a little entertainment back.  I was going to write a post I was thinking about, about politics, but when I do it riles Beagles and it bores Old Dog.  I was doing some correspondence with a friend of mine and she mentioned Karmann Ghias which got me to thinking about getting ahead.  Perhaps it will inspire the dawgs to tell their own tales of getting ahead.

Did somebody say Karmann Ghia?  Bruce used to have a Karmann Ghia.  We used to go on rides of a summer evening on the little curvy, slightly hilly, roads south of Herrin, dangerously close to the super prison though we never saw hide nor hair of it, much less a convict in torn striped clothes standing by the road with one thumb out and the other hand holding a shiv behind his back.  Bruce worked in the lab in the hospital, a bit more prestigious than being a janitor like me and Craig or  an orderly like John.  We knew him well enough, and we hung with him a bit, but he was the kind of guy who always left the party before it really got going.

He was the kind of guy who was going places, not that there is anything wrong with that.  What if I did what my parents were constantly nagging me to do, apply myself?  I picture myself sometimes in one of those tony burbs in a big tony house having retired some years ago from that prestigious tony job (maybe a plaque on the wall of my den, For forty-five years of dedicated service for blah, blah, blah.  (In my fat state job they were always giving each other plaques, hanging them on their cubicle walls for visitors to admire.  (I never got a plaque.  What I got was a "Don't let the door hit your butt on the way out", and what they were worried about was damage to the door, not to my butt.)))

Bruce was at the U of I for awhile, dropped into Chin's once or twice, but never had a third beer.  Moved on after that, moving on up.  I never would have heard from him again if not for the miracle of fb.  He's some kind of applied scientist, living in North Carolina, kids, grandkids, maybe a great or two, and just a little bit too republican sounding to my partisan democrat ears. 

Could have been me I suppose.  If I'd only applied myself.  If I had never roomed with the guy who later led me into hanging out at the Tavern in the Illini Union.  If I had never set foot into the House of Chin.  But of course these were things I always wanted to do so I have no one to blame but myself, and I am easy on myself.

Oh I did haul myself out to the local junior college and made that trek to Texas to find my fortune, but that foundered and I ended up in that state job in Chicago.  At one point, living in my parents attic and working the boring job, I had thoughts of maybe becoming a big time bureaucrat like my bosses, and I made a fledgling attempt but was quickly slapped down by the pros.

John in Champaign, working at Kraft I think, living in a house with beer-drinking buddies, was offered the path to higher ed by a friend and rode that into becoming a principal, but got nothing but grief from the schoolboards, and now, retired, is doing what he always wanted to do, play in a rock and roll band.

Craig I'm not so sure.  I don't remember when he got  that job at Flex N Gate, but my impression is that it was a pretty sweet gig and he just rode that to retirement.

I guess everything works out in the end.