Cultural habituation and personal hypocrisy? A personal pondering.

Great Depression era occupation education poster.

I've been thinking. Tomorrow it will be 28 years to the day that I've been in the service. 28 years in peace and war. I don't suppose I've been at home more than 10 months in all that time. Still, it's been a good life. I loved India. I wouldn't have had it any other way. But there are times when suddenly you realize you're nearer the end than the beginning. And you wonder, you ask yourself, what the sum total of your life represents. What difference your being there at any time made to anything. Hardly made any difference at all, really, particularly in comparison with other men's careers. I don't know whether that kind of thinking's very healthy, but I must admit I've had some thoughts on those lines from time to time. But tonight... tonight!

Col. Nicholson, to Col. Saito, Bridge on the River Kwai.

I obviously have a lot of thoughts about how things ought to be.  People who have a lot of thoughts on how things ought to be are naturally subject to the query on how well they've applied them, themselves.  Naturally, with so many thoughts, we must have gotten things pretty much right ourselves, right?

Why do you observe the splinter in your brother's eye and never notice the great log in your own?  And how dare you say to your brother, "Let me take that splinter out of your eye," when, look, there is a great log in your own?

Matthew.

I note this as a person could rationally question me on some of those things, and I do indeed question myself on some of them.

 NCHS Assembly, 1981.

I'll be frank that if you had spoken to me in May of 1981, when I was a freshly minted 17 year old graduate from NCHS, and asked me where I hoped to be in, let's say, ten years career wise, you would have met with some hopes and expectations, but they would have been very ill formed at best.  Indeed, for the last couple of years of high school, and high school was only three years long at that time (9th Grade was part of junior high) I'd have told you that I wanted to be a game warden.

For my junior and senior years of high school I meandered towards that end.  When I'd been younger than that I'd wanted to be an Army officer.  But that desire had waned over time and probably had pretty much completely waned by the time I actually entered high school.  If that thought had seriously remained at that time I likely would have entered high school JrROTC, which I didn't.  I still had thoughts of joining the service to experience it, but even those were slacking up.  I ultimately did, but in the form of joining the Army National Guard which was partially in order to simply experience something that every older male I knew had experienced, and additionally in order to be true to myself.  It's one of the career decisions, if that's what itw as, that I've never had any second thoughts or regrets about.

 

Me in 1986 as a Sergeant in the Wyoming Army national Guard in South Korea.  If you saw a photo of me from high school compared to this, you'd be amazed as I look so much older in this photograph even though, at this time, I was only five years out of high school and just out of my college undergraduate.  Joining the Army National Guard was one of the best post high school decisions I made.

Anyhow, during high school I pretty much lost the desire for an Army career and pondered what it was that I wanted to do. Writing, as in being a journalist, occurred to me, but never enough to stick.  I'd have opted for being a farmer or a rancher in a heart beat, but I was a more realistic person back then than I was to be later and I could tell that there wasn't a way to make that happen.  So it seemed to me that being a game warden was the best option for an outdoor person such as myself.

Soon after I graduated, however, I changed that goal based on a singular piece of advice from my father, which was his simple observation that there were a lot of people around here with degrees in Wildlife Management who didn't have jobs, which was quite true.

It's odd that this had such an impact as he only noted it once, and that in response to a query as to what my plans for college were.  With that simple comment, I decided to change my intended major to geology.

That change was motivated by the fact that, as my mother often noted, I was good at science and my father, a dentist, undoubtedly was very good at it.  Geology, I reasoned, was an outdoor career and that would be the next best thing to being a game warden.

That would prove to be a type of mistake, maybe.  Geology was a really hard field of study, much much more difficult than my later one of law, and frankly I never developed a real love for it.  My goal was mostly for an outdoor career, and geology takes place all outdoors.  I did stick with it, however, which is something I've proven to be really good at post high school for good or ill.

 

Interior of Geology lab, University of Wyoming, 1986.

I was pondering changing field by the time I was graduating from Casper College.  This was because, by that time, the market for geologist was tanking and we knew it. When I started in geology in the fall of 1981 the market was so hot that graduates with AS degrees were going right to work. By the time I graduated in 1983 it was so cold that a person needed a graduate degree in geology to find work.  As I was completing my AS degree I really didn't know if I wanted to go on all the way to getting a MS degree.

The simple recommendation that I should consider a career in an "analytical field" as I had an "analytical mind" caused me to consider a career in the law.  That suggestion was made by Casper College history professor Jon Brady whom, I later learned, had a JD.  That same suggestion was made to another Casper College graduate who also now practices law.

Showing, I guess, how simple suggestions can indeed have huge impacts.

Anyhow, as I was graduating with a BS degree in geology it was pretty clear that I wasn't going to get a job so I pondered what to do next.  I thought very seriously about returning to my first goal and going on for a degree in Zoology.  I also thought about going on for a Masters Degree in geology, basically on the "now I have no choice" line of thinking.  And I decided to apply to law school because I had never known an unemployed lawyer and it seemed to me that most of the professionals I knew got to go outdoors a lot and they all seemed to have a lot of interests, most of which didn't have much to do with their lines of work.  I was pretty naive.

One of the things I was naive about was the process of getting into law school, which I knew entailed taking the LSAT but which I didn't realize had the dreaded test status.  Indeed, I didn't know that the test for graduate school, the GRE, had that status either.  I took both.  I was admitted to graduate school at the University of Idaho Department of Geology and to Law School at the University of Wyoming.  I don't remember now how many geology departments I applied to (I know that one was UW,  and that it was nearly impossible for a UW BS graduate to get into our own geology department as they figured it defeated academic diversity) but I know that UW was the only law school I applied to.  I didn't think I'd get in and I didn't want to waste my time applying all over, let alone studying for the LSAT. I scored high on both the LSAT and the GRE (which I also didn't study for) as it turned out.

I took one last run at becoming a game warden, however.  Just after I graduated with my bachelors a friend of mine and I went down to Cheyenne and took the Game Warden's Exam.  Oddly, while my friend had a BS in Biology and I did not, I passed and he didn't.  They didn't offer the test again for years, which his common for the Wyoming Game & Fish, but about three years into my law school career, which would be about six years after I took the test, the Wyoming Game & Fish offered me a summer position.  I would have had to quit my job as a lawyer to take it.  I actually seriously considered it, but I'd just become engaged and I feared that taking a part time job that paid peanuts and giving up a stable law job wasn't wise.  As I've been a lawyer now for nearly 30 years the stability and wage part of that was correct.  Still,  "there are times when suddenly you realize you're nearer the end than the beginning. And you wonder, you ask yourself, what the sum total of your life represents. What difference your being there at any time made to anything. Hardly made any difference at all, really, particularly in comparison with other men's careers."

Anyhow, I've done a lot of odd work over the years.  True, I've been a lawyer since Blackstone was a pup, but I've also raised cattle my entire married life.  I worked on a drilling rig when I was a student.  I was a Sergeant in the Army National Guard.  And because I've seen a lot of blue collar type work, and because my family was always close to agriculture, I've never really accepted the common American view that success is defined by ever increasing wages represented by ever more significant occupation of degreed professions.  My father, who held a DDS, didn't think that way either, although my mother at least somewhat did.  My parents believed that my getting a college degree was important as they knew that my prospects would be poor otherwise, and they quietly encouraged me in that direction, particularly early on in my college career when I questioned it.  At one time, for reasons I can't even recall now, I seriously thought of just quitting after a semester and finding a town job, a decision that, given our economy, would have been a disaster.  And I also at one time asked my father if he could ask a rancher friend of his that he knew well if they might have an opening for a cowboy for the same reason.  I'm sure he never asked. By the time I was in UW those sorts of fleeting flights of discouraged thought had fled and after a semester at UW I knew that I would graduate with a BS in Geology.

So, what's the point of all of this?

Well, even though I've always told myself that I don't think that just because a persons' parents have a college degree or degrees that their children must, and even though I have always maintained that the sons and daughters of dentists and lawyers don't have to have even more strenuous academic degrees I've apparently absorbed enough of that simply by living in the culture, and more particularly by being in a setting in which that kind of thought is constant, that I find I do think that way to at least a degree.

The way that this comes up is this.

One of my son's friends determined to major in Wildlife Management.  He is a big outdoorsman and that was his motivation.  I just found out that, at the end of this Semester, he's going to stop with his AS and work on becoming an electrician.

Now, at the same time, I employ a runner, the daughter of immigrants, who has as her career goal becoming an electrician.

And I oddly find myself thinking that the latter person's goal is great, while the former person's change of plans is sad.

Now, why is that?

I'm not entirely sure myself.

Some of it, I'm pretty sure, is a latent tinge of regret of the "road not taken" type.  That's not a complaint, but frankly I never see a game warden around here and don't envy their jobs a bit.  Now, I have never done that job, and so my envy may well be misplaced.  One game warden who was around here for years and who rose up high in the department, and has now passed away, once told me that he recommended that people who like outdoor activities not take up the field, but get a "good job" (always an elusive category) that allowed them to have time to be outdoors.  Another young warden, however, recently told me that she found time to hunt and fish, and one some time ago spent a lot of time with me talking about shotguns, about which he knew more than a little bit, and obviously found time to use.  Anyhow, having traveled sort of a similar road, in that I know his parents were worried about him finding work, and I suspect that he's about to get engaged, I find that maybe I'm vicariously repeating my past.  It's not that I regret getting engaged all those many years, we're still together after all those many years, but it's like seeing your own past sort of repeat.  If I could go back and get a warden's job, after having been in court for 30 years and having handled a pile of cases and trials I think I'd do it.

Which is easy to say.  Maybe your feeling would always be the other way around and you'd never pass a television show about the law and not wonder. . .I know that in mentioning this idly to a fellow lawyer friend of mine, who has a very German work ethic as, well, he's German he dismissed it instantly, having the same opinion as Jon Brady, noting; "with your inquiring mind you are only suitable for the law and the clergy. . and you couldn't have become a clergyman".   Therefore, he noted, in his Germanic analytical view that my position in the law was a natural and mandatory, the Roman Collar being the only other option, which isn't an option, as I'm married.  I wasn't married, I'd note, at the time I became a lawyer but that's really besides the point as I'm not called to the pulpit.  I'd also note that he has the very distinct German view, related to the American one but even more pronounced, that a child of a professional must become some sort of professional or an engineer.  To do otherwise is an absolute failure.

Well, who knows about all of that.

On the other hand, maybe an element of this is sort of the ingrained American Capitalist/American Dream Imperative.  The next generation must always "do better" because, it must.

Whatever that means.

There's no intrinsic reason to measure success in life in such a fashion.  In the deepest terms possible, a successful life has to be measured with a metaphysical yard stick, not a physical one, and certainly not one based on money or status.  And I believe that.  So it surprises me to find that I have a bit of the more conventional American (I guess) yardstick.

I started pondering this the other day actually before I was aware of the information above actually when I was reminded of the death of a lawyer in Cheyenne that I did not know well, but another lawyer who was with me did.  He was going to visit his grave site in Guernsey on his way home.  I hadn't realized that the deceased lawyer was from Guernsey, but he was.

Indeed, I learned that he was a highly devout Catholic and daily communicant, that he'd grown up in Guernsey and Wheatland, married his high school sweetheart and had three children. Two of the children, an obituary I saw, were physicians.

St. Anthony's Catholic Church in Guernsey.

Now that started me to think a bunch of various thought on this topic.  For one thing, it's interesting how he retained a connection to Guernsey, a small railroad/military/farming town in Wyoming.  He wanted apparently to be buried there. Does that signal a connection with a person's hometown that's deeper than the one they lived  during their careers?  Maybe.  Indeed, just today I saw an obituary of a man who had grown up in Oklahoma but spent all his post service career in Wyoming.  The internment was in Oklahoma.  It must have remained dear to him.

Anyhow, that struck me.  It's interesting how often a person's career takes him away from what he loves, maybe for most of a person's life, and its often the case that the "better" that career is, the more likely that is.  Of course, in my case, that's not true.  I live in the town I grew up in, and over the years five of my co-workers (now down to two) share that distinction.  And part of that is because I do love the region, and the state, and the outdoors here.  If I were from Guernsey and moved to Cheyenne to work, would I think the same thing?  It's not really far, but I wonder.

The same obituary, however, as noted had the two out of three children who were doctors. Those individuals were, of course, residents of Cheyenne in their youth, not Guernsey. Are they metaphysical successes, as the late lawyer mentioned above was?  Well, I don't know, but I often wonder about things like that.  People will "brag on" their children's careers, but sometimes that's all there is to brag about in that context (I'm not saying that about these people, I don't know them).  That is, I've known people who I admired for one reason or another but who had one or more children that had high paying careers but which I'd otherwise regard as failures, often because money was all they cared about.  Still, in my line of work I very often hear about children of lawyers who become lawyer or doctors and its' hard not to pick up the view that this is some sort of mandatory norm.

Of course it isn't.  I've sort of known to sheriff's officers whose fathers were physicians or dentist.  As we're not in medieval guilds, we are free to go the path we'd like to, and indeed it seems we should irrespective of real or imagined social expectations.

Indeed, I'm sure that I never lived up to any social expectations myself.  When I graduated from high school and entered college I remember, at one point very early on, telling one of my friends who was going on into engineering that I wasn't too sure I'd make it through college.  I'm not sure why I thought that. My friend scoffed and said that if anyone was going to make it through college out of our group, I would. That proved partially correct.  Out of our close group of friends, two did not graduate although I'd regard all of them as successful.  The one that spoke those words dropped out when he married after nearly four years in university to go to work, and ultimately ended up a business owner, now retired.  Another who planned on being a dentist took a summer job in an electrical shop and never looked back, now being one of the owners of that establishment.  The third could never find work in his chosen academic field, music, and went on into computers, which he was always good at, but acquired a MBA on the way.  I guess my path diverted too.  I didn't become an employed geologist and ended up a lawyer instead. Shades of Truckin' there, I suppose:

Truckin', like the do-dah man. Once told me "You've got to play your hand"
Sometimes your cards ain't worth a dime, if you don't lay'em down,
Sometimes the light's all shinin' on me,
Other times I can barely see.
Lately it occurs to me what a long, strange trip it's been.

* * *

Truckin', up to Buffalo. Been thinkin', you got to mellow slow
Takes time, you pick a place to go, and just keep truckin' on.

Truckin. . . something that I'm sure most people who know me never expected to see here.

Hmmmm. . . ..

Or maybe not.

There is a Boarding House. . .glimpses of the earlier world.**

Well anyhow.

Who knows.  It's interesting how you acquire a set of views and standards but sometimes those are pretty heavily impacted by those people you are around one way or another.  My egalitarian father impacted my views very heavily on and those are the ones I think I retain.  Living in a different world however, I've clearly picked up a lot of "American" views whether I sought to or not.

I guess everyone hopes for something along the lines of the final scenes for Wil Andersen, the tough cowboy figure in the movie The Cowboys, in which he observed.

Wil Andersen:  Every man wants his children to be better than he was.  You are.

It's funny how we often don't really grasp what we think of that ourselves, however.  People 's standards are often expressed one away and manifested in another, or even expressed in diametrically opposed ways from time to time.

Takin Care Of Business. . . the slacker anthem of the Baby Boomers. . . a generation that went on to exceed their parents in materialism and dedication to it, and to complain that millennials were slackers.

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*My father very rarely gave any career type advice, or any life type advice for that matter.  In fairness to him, I grew up really fast as a teenager as my mother was extremely ill and for much of that time I basically was without a mother in practical terms and it was just me and my father.  One of my very good friends today takes the position that I basically never had a childhood and went right to being an adult. That's not true, and in actuality I did have a childhood, but my teen years were highly accelerated from those years to my adult ones because that's the way life made it.  I don't have regrets about that as life isn't fair and people who bitch about a thing like that are expecting more than a person can reasonably expect.

I'd additionally note, however, that this was the same in some ways for my father.  His father died when he was in his late teens and he went right to being a responsible adult.  In some ways his career decisions were a little compelled by my Irish American grandmother who couldn't stand for the thought of her oldest highly intelligent son working in the Post Office for the rest of his life, which was basically my father's plan after he went to work there following my grandfather's death.  He started off in engineering, as he was a natural at math, but switched to dentistry following the example of an older brother in law who took that up following his return from the Submarine service during World War Two.  My father was really good at everything medical but, like almost all of the local dentist and doctors of that generation, he was sort of  dispossessed agriculturalist at heart, something that had a pretty big impact on me.

Anyhow, given that he sincerely felt that a person had to find their own way, and because he'd had to find his own way himself, he just basically didn't give life advice.  When he did, it tended to be in the rare form of a simple observation, such as noted above, and you really listened to it as it was in fact so rare and he knew so much.


**Old Soldiers Never Die.  Another glimpse of the earlier world, based musically on There Is A Boarding House.