Friday, October 18, 2019

IT HAS BEEN YEARS AND I KNOW THAT NO ONE READS THIS STUFF BECAUSE NOW THERE IS FACEBOOK/TWITTER/INSTAGRAM.
 Good. I just need to put this thought somewhere that it could maybe be found, not shove it in the face of my friends, all of a sudden and out of the blue. As you get older, these thoughts and memories show up all of a sudden and out of the blue.
Sometimes I think about if I could go back and change one thing what would it be.
I know what killed my first marriage. Of all the obvious things that I can point to there is one time, one event, one action that started the ball rolling. If we all had cell phones back then, it would never have happened. I do not know how I could have stopped this. But if I had, I think my life would have been very different.

My first wife and I did not have any children yet. I worked at RCA and she had gone back to university for her PHD in EE and was starting a teaching job at a local college. I occasionally had to travel to Marion Indiana to support some instrumentation in the factory. She was preparing for the qualifying exams. I was on a trip and having problems and was going to stay an extra day and miss my flight. She had just accepted a teaching job and it was her first day of working there.

I started calling early in the morning. I left a message on the answering machine at home but that was not heard. I called the number she gave me for her new job. The secretary that picked up said she had seen Mary and would pass on the message. That message was never passed on. I called her mother at work but she also was not able to contact Mary that day. Mary sat at the airport for hours waiting for me and finally went in to find out that I was not on my flight.  She was upset. She worried allot in those days. We finally talked late that night when she got home. She had her first qualifier the next day and was unfocused and tired.

She did not continue with her PHD, although she eventually became department chairperson at that college where she started teaching. I left RCA about a year later.  For my remaining trips I took a shuttle home instead of being picked up by my hot young tanned wife dressed in a short white dress in her black Firebird.

We soon had children. She took a slower route to prestige. I am not sure if our lives would have better or worse but I definitely feel like I let her down when she needed me and I messed up her plans.

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