March 21, 2009

• 71 years on the planet continued.

  After graduation we moved to Wichita Kansas, my wife started nursing in the hospital I went to work as a news photographer for KA KE TV. It didn’t take long to tire of chasing ambulances and that job only lasted five months. I then became an insurance adjuster which was an okay job. I knew it wasn’t a career for me but the salary was double the slave wages of the TV station. It was an okay job and I made some very good friends there. It was incredibly easy to party every weekend and I loved easy. I traveled the country on storm duty, which led me party every night. One of the saddest days of my life was in November when JFK got shot. He was my hero. In 1965 I decided to go back to graduate school and just before we sold our house and packed our goods for the journey lover(who was never supposed to be able to have a child, got pregnant). My assistantship fell through and lover was going downhill under her workload. We quit school and I went back to the insurance adjusting .company and stayed for three years until he instituted the G.I. Bill and our first child was born.  This was an exciting and wonderful time and we got our financial life back together in a couple of years. I enrolled in graduate school and got my degree in 1967. I loved graduate school, found it quite easy and decided to stay for my PhD. I didn’t score well on the graduate record examination and entered with the understanding that I would bring my test scores. This was the time the riots over Martin Luther King’s death and our apartment was very close to the riot area. I was counseling at Richard’s Gabeur Air Force Base got stopped for violating curfew eight times in a 10 mile stretch. We decided it was a wonderful time to leave Kansas City and I got a job as a housing director of the University of Minnesota-Morris starting in the fall of 1968. These were my favorite alltime years because I love hippies and became a whitecollar one. Everyone in Minnesota drinks so I was living in heaven the next 10 years were my happiest so far especially when I moved over to the counseling center. We adopted a 6 year old boy in 1972 and my youngest miricle child was born in 1975.My job there ended in 1975 and I hung around for three years and started a woodworking shop. I had no skill or interest in what I was doing and we decided quickly that this was a good time to leave the tundra. We settled in Springfield Missouri and my life was not working, heavy drinking every night and no sense of fulfillment. My option was either suicide or getting my ship together so I went off for four months to a growth center in Kentucky. This was an incredible metaphorical death and rebirth experience. I arrived there as a broken person and left with a new perspective on life. I never drank again and decided I would go five years without drinking and then became an alcohol counselor. I worked in a couple of treatment centers in the mid-80s and started my private practice in 1987 my life was incredible until I messed my heart up skydiving in2001, and suffered a down period health wise .  My pacemaker turned me back into a functioning human being and I did okay through two major and three minor surgeries, but locked myself in a survival mode until just recently when I came alive again.  Now I’m ready to renew the passion in my life.

  Thanks for listening and keep the faith.

  David

   

  • 5:32 pm
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