Doing it right

Canal in Punta Gorda, FL

A second email from my HS friend. He lives in Florida, retired. His back door is a dock on a canal, the water leading him to the local harbor. He is doing it right.

Moreover, after losing his wife a few years back, his high school sweetheart (whom I knew, of course), he connected with M, one of the few girls in all our math/science classes, and now they go sailing together. He is doing it right.

Sounds to me like his life has had the clear trajectory that all of us expected to have after high school. But not all of us became physicists or mathematicians, and I may have had the most convoluted trajectory of them all.  I can trace these changes and influences:

• leaving Cal Tech. There were 2 reasons. (The suicide of my high school buddy who went to CIT with me is not one of them, interestingly enough.) I was still living at home. But if I'd have gone to MIT, I think the rest still would have happened because of 2. I located my place in the mathematical community, which wasn't as elevated as I'd been led to believe. Even though I published in a math journal as a Cal Tech sophomore, I clearly saw my limitations. I think I wanted a freer horizon, a more unlimited future of possibilities. I didn't want to become an engineer or math teacher, the two likely spots for me if I continued. I had no desire to become a writer at this point. Also at this transition, Linus Pauling was very supportive. I left Cal Tech, and my mother nearly had a nervous breakdown.
• At Berkeley I went a little nuts. Away from home for the first time. Really got into playing folk music. More real interest in the humanities. Dropped out of Berkeley, broke, had choice of borrowing money from parents or joining Army, chose the later. And the Army changed my life because I ended up in the Army Security Agency with guys who typically had an M.A. in the humanities from an Ivy League college, joined before being drafted, and all these "big brothers" and fellow Russian linguists (after the language school) whetted my appetite for "becoming a writer."
• After the Army, back to school. A literature major now -- but not yet a writer. Went to UCLA and initially to grad school at U of Oregon as PhD type, Amer Lit emphasis, Melville emphasis. In grad school I learned somebody beat me to my thesis. Typical. But I didn't take it too well. Dropped out again, this time with a woman who heard and encouraged my dreams to "become a writer" ... and readers of this blog know the rest. If you don't, it's all in my memoir, Dress Rehearsals. Also in my short film, Deconstructing Sally.

A little different from going to college, getting a degree, getting a job, and living happily ever after.