Foresight is not 20/20, but the funny thing on these is that I had at least an inkling that I'd regret taking the fork in the road I took but took it anyhow. I suspect that's true of a lot of regrets. You know better, but reason yourself out of the path or into another one for some reason. I don't know why these come to mind, but in the spirit of end of the year reflections, I'll post these.
1. I wish I'd stayed in the National Guard.
Me in South Korea. This was just a few months before I mustered out of the Army National Guard. I wish I'd stayed in.
I joined the Army National Guard and stayed in it for the entire required first time enlistment period of six years. I liked being in the National Guard.
I got out because, after six years, I was getting really bored. That's a problem with Guard units. Unlike the Regular Army, you are in a small unit in which the tasks are pretty fixed. I went from being a 13B cannoneer to a 13F artillery liaison but still, I was at the point where one more annual class on Preventative Maintenance Checks and Services on the field phone was going to push me over the edge of sanity.* I just couldn't see myself doing that for another fourteen years in order to retire from the Guard.
Well, in fairness, that was only part of it. The other part is that I'd become such a fixture in the unit that it was simply assumed I'd reenlist. Given that, nobody asked until my last drill, by which time I was mad. At that one, the full time troop in charge of that, who was not a popular figure in the unit, simply came to me and cheerfully said "I have your papers ready!" Simply assuming something like that made me mad and I simply replied "What papers?", and then informed him I wasn't reenlisting. He didn't put up a fight about it, but it was pretty apparent I wasn't happy with having been asked so late. Besides that, now looking back, he was probably trying to figure out how to explain that one of the long time valued NCOs was leaving without a word on the topic. Things like that didn't go well inside the unit for full timers as a rule and he was far from the most popular figure in the unit as it was.
I should note that before I reached that point I did in fact try to do a couple of things to address the boredom. I volunteered for jump school, but there's no real reason to send artillerymen to jump school and the Army was logically not taking artillerymen from Guard units to jump school. I then volunteered for Ranger school, but the Army's logic was the same. The irony here is that during the last three months of my Guard service both of those things changed for Guardsmen and by that time I had my mind made up to leave even though a full timer had informed me "we can send you to jump school now".
And along with another friend of mine, I'd planned on switching over to a Mountain unit if we got one, which the statue was up for at the time. Vermont got the unit instead. If we'd received it, I would have certainly reupped and I may well have in fact done 20.
In retrospect, what I really should have done was to go to Officers Candidate School in 1986, which I easily could have gotten into, as by that time I was still young enough and had a college education. I ended up spending that year after my undergraduate degree was in my pocket as an unemployed geologist. No, that's not true. I spent that year as an Army National Guardsmen for the most part, as I worked pretty continually at the Armory when work was available. And then when I applied (re-applied actually) to law school, I bought off on the law school propaganda that law school is super hard, which it isn't, and thought I'd have no time to be a Guardsmen and a law student.**
All of which makes me regret it now. The Guard was really good to me and I was petty in getting out. Or just bored. The regular full timers, the Retention NCO aside, were good to me. I feel like an ingrate.
And I also felt pained, in a way that's hard to explain, when they went to Iraq in the second war, in small assignments, and to Afghanistan the same way. I was in that unit, albeit having been out for years, and you feel like a character in The Four Feathers as a result.
I wish I'd stayed in.
Of course, like all such wishes, that assumes that things go well after you make the alternative decision and that being in the Guard didn't mean that you were killed in Baghdad or stepped on a mine in Afghanistan.
2. I wish I'd learned more foreign languages
Foreign students working on scripts for recording by the Office of War Information during World War Two. Some of those broadcasts were in French and German, two languages which I've studied. I wish I retained a lot more German than I do, but I've been surprised in recent years that French started coming back to me.
In junior high, and at home at that time, I studied French. I studied German in high school and university. So I'm not unexposed to languages. And oddly, things about languages that I studied when you have tended to come back now that I'm old, and along the way I've picked up the ability to read a fair amount of Spanish and some Latin. Contrary to what people generally state, I've found picking them up easier as I have gotten older for some reason.
I love languages and therefore I wish that I'd been more diligent student of French when I was young and that I'd picked up a real command of it and German. I also wish that I'd branched into other languages like Latin and Spanish, and maybe even others. I've often been curious about Russian, for example, but have gotten good enough at languages that I can start to pick up a little of it through Russian movies, although I loose it just as quickly. It'd be neat to know Arabic, and Hebrew, and Greek. . . .
I just like them and find them fascinating. I could have done that, but I just didn't.
3. I wish I'd really learned how to play the guitar well.
Stevie Ray Vaughan, guitar hero.
When I was young I was given a guitar and learned to play it somewhat. My mother later learned how to play it in her 40s and we gave her, one year, an electric guitar.
I don't have either guitar anymore, as I never learned how to play very well and when my kids, both of whom learned to play the guitar and play it well, did that, I gave them the guitars.
But I wish I'd learned how to do that. Like foreign languages, it's a diligence problem.
And too bad too, as I really like the type of music that favors guitars, the Blues in particular.
And while we're on topics musical. . .
Zydeco dancing. I wish I could do that.
I'm old enough now to admit this.
The period of time I grew up in was the golden age of bad dancing. Among the other things the 1960s wrecked, it wrecked dancing. Sure, there was that whole disco thing in the 70s but real people, at least high school students in the West, didn't learn stuff like that. So we mostly only knew something about moving around badly on the dance floor.
The dancing blight existed probably from the late 1960s into the early 1980s. I remember going to a Foreign Students Dance (I had a law school girl friend at the time who was from Europe) and it was just all hoping around. Pathetic.
Anyhow, my wife really knows how to dance well and I've picked up a little of it. but not much. I've suggested from time to time that we go to the local community college dancing night class, but she's always just laughed it off, probably as I'm such an inept dancer.
I could have done better there for sure.
5. I wish I'd really learned how to weld
Welding. I wish I knew how. . . but I wouldn't weld stuff like this. I'd really like to be able to build a a grill guard for my 97 Jeep, but I can't.
Weld?
Yup, weld.
I'm pretty handy with my hands, and I was taught sort of how to weld by a friend of mind who had learned in high school. But I wish I knew how to do it really well.
Metal fabrication is so handy. I really wish I knew how to do that.
6. I wish I had learned auto mechanics really well.
I'm also a fair shade tree mechanic.
But I wish was a really good shade tree mechanic.
Now, don't get me wrong. I have no desire to be a professional mechanic. But I like working on engines and I really wish I'd learned how to do that really well.
I in fact can, but when it gets to the really complicated stuff, I'm done. I couldn't rebuilt an engine for example.
This is true, by the way (and I'll just through it in here for that reason) on working on auto bodies. I really admire people who can do that really well. I've done a little, but nobody would mistake me for a pro in this area. I wish I could do that.
1954 Chevrolet I once owned.
To add to it, I always have some old cars. I've had to work on them, therefore, by default, although my father did a lot of his own work, and I learned from him, which gets us to another topic, that being that I wished I was a better teacher of such things to my children myself, which I have not been.
At the Speas Fish Hatchery with my father when I was a little kid.
Here's one that I need to be a bit careful about, as it could be read really incorrectly.
I don't have a degree in wildlife management. But in spite of that, after I obtained my degree in geology, I was offered a job with the Game and Fish.
Now, offered isn't really the right word. I tested for the Game Warden's examination and passed it, and then well over a year later was offered an introductory position with the Game and Fish. I declined as I was getting married and couldn't see how I could get by on such a small amount of compensation. They asked if perhaps I could take a sabbatical from my job for it. I didn't see that being possible (and I'm sure it wasn't), so I didn't do that.
Now, what I'm not saying is that I regret my later and present career path, etc. But what I'm saying here is that I'm curious. I often see Game Wardens out in the sticks and interact with quite a few (including the somewhat awkward and nearly silent female warden I spoke to last week). Some of them I really like. I wonder what that job is like, but the only way to know the answer to that is to have done it. But I'll never know, as I didn't take that fork. If I had, perhaps it would have been only temporary, as it seems that a constant supply of young wardens here must mean that they leave their employment with that agency fairly quickly.
I can't really say that's an "I wish" as that would have changed so much, probably, that, its something I can't really imagine and don't mean to suggest, as in "oh may gosh, everything is so awful, if only I'd accompanied Elmarizeria on her trip across the Atlantic to the New World". Nope. Indeed, you don't know if a passage that radical is like watching the Titanic depart and wishing you were on it at the time.
On this, I've noticed over time that almost all of the Game Wardens I run into anymore are young. Almost 100%. That makes me wonder if the turnover is actually pretty high, as I don't see any older ones. Maybe I never did and just didn't notice it. By the same token, I know that the Game and Fish went from a system which tended to favor locals to one that filters through a lot of national applicants and I frankly wonder if the young grads who move out from Wisconsin or whatever can't adjust to Wyoming.
Anyhow, this isn't so much of a "I wish", as curiosity about what its like. But then I have that about a lot of occupations. Quite a few of them I learn what its like through my profession, which is one of the positives about my profession.
8. I wish I'd gotten past the Judgeship bar.
Courthouse. I'm not going to be working in one of these as a judge. Some lawyers view that like getting to the the pitcher or the quarterback or the general. Quite a few don't.
I'm one of the lawyers that's applied for district court judgeship when they've come up, if those judgeship were near me. I.e, I applied for them in my home town and in the neighboring city in the neighboring county. The last two times I got interviews, but I never made the three finalists.
Now I'm done. At age 55, every judge in this county is either younger than me or sufficiently young that by the time I retire I'll be in my 60s. There's no point in applying at that point as, no matter what they say, you aren't going to get it. The Governor doesn't want to appoint somebody for a single term. Heck, for that matter, he may very well not be going to pick one at 55 either. My bolt is shot.
I'll admit that I am in fact not only disappointed but bitter about it. Different lawyers have different aspirations and apparently mine was to be a judge. I know that I would have been good at it and in fact I was urged more than once by sitting or retiring judges to apply as they thought I'd be good at it. Now, there's no earthly way that I'll get it.
Being bitter over it caught me by surprise. The realization that I'm now never going to get it has been something that's been pretty hard on me and it's been extremely disappointing to recall it even while I'm posing about it here.
My wife always says that things happen for a reason. And I suppose they do. Stuff happens all the time in real life that prove to be Providential if not wished for, and are celebrated in a way in depictions such as Its A Wonderful Life or Mr. Holland's Opus. Lots of really first rate lawyers I know have experienced this. I wish that I wasn't.
9. Human interactions
I've never been a mean person and by and large I think that I've always tried to act properly in interactions with folks. But not always. I've wish I've done better from time to time, and can think of some specific examples that other people would not worry about retrospectively at all, that I do, as I've tended to focus more on such things as I've grown older.
All actions have impacts. I don't think we think enough about that.
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*Field phones were used to teach PMCS as they're small, most units have a lot of them, and the class can be taught indoors while the principles apply to everything.
**I'd been admitted for the Law School entry class of 1986 while finishing up by BS in Geology. I'd also been admitted to the University of Idaho for the Geology Masters program. As I'd been in school for five years (post high school) I decided to pass on both of them and look for work. I didn't find any as there were no geology jobs out there at all, so I took the law school option, my spot oddly enough held open for me in that interval. A student the year ahead of me, a very nice girl I later got to somewhat know, took by spot in 86 and got into law school solely because I'd chosen not to go that year.
There were a lot of things going on that year. For one thing, my mother was literally on death's door the entire year. At any rate, the job I principally occupied, off and on, was soldier for that year. In retrospect that put me in a little different position than a lot of guys who served only one hitch in the National Guard in that era, as during it I was employed full time off and on a fair amount.
On law school, it isn't hard, contrary to the widespread belief to the contrary. It was much easier than my geology undergraduate course of study. I tend to think that the myth law is hard is caused by lawyers having not really studied anything else.
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