Into the Fireplace

The opportunity was there. I was injured on the job and physically unable to return to the same position. I got a note from Goldfinger saying I couldn't go aboe 15 feet and I couldn't go on rooftops. This is reasonable as I had no depth perception, and having that is critical to, say, catching yourself so you don't fall off a roof.

I took this info to the Fireboss, and he read the restriction. He made a serious of weird faces as he looked at it...for probably five or ten minutes he did this. He probably wanted to say "go away," but he legally couldn't. He apparently didn't know what to do with me. He should have said, "we don't have a place for you," and I would have been free in my mind to go onto the retraining...but he didn't.

No, instead he waffled around for a week, talking on his phone to his wife (the other half of the business) and generally wasting time. I finally called the lawyer I'd gotten to deal with the whole matter to see what he thought, and he put pressure on the insurance people to put pressure on the Fireboss to make a decision. So a decision was made.

I became a technician under the guy who installed the gas logs. My job became going to houses, both new and old, to install and repair gas logs of all varieties. It was highly technical and mechanical type work, but perfect for my sensibilities, so for a time, I enjoyed it.

I'd say one of the most amusing times I had (and saddest) was when I'd gone out to a house to find out why their remote wasn't working. First thing I did: change the battery. It worked. That'll be $45. They fussed, but I deferred to the office, and that it was a service call. That was about the only time I ever dealt with cash of any kind, too. Most of the time, the service was already paid for.

The Queen, at that time, was employed at a bank working in the cash vault in the dungeon. She has this thing for money. Now don't misunderstand me, she's not one of those weird greedy chicks, but she likes the smell of the paper money, especially when it's brand new. When she was growing up, she always went for the paper rather than coins like most kids, because she thought it was "pretty." Smart kid.

So to date, she's the only one of us who's actually seen what a million dollars in cash looks like since she had occasion to deal with that much down there counting in the dungeon.

Once I was installing the logs, though, we were back on track as much as we were before. The wedding had been scheduled for the coming April, and preparations were well underway. She is far more qualified to speak of all that than I am, because you have to remember what a guy's job is in the preparation of a wedding: stay out of the way when not requested, provide input only when requested, and show up on time.

That's not a chauvinistic approach. It's just that a wedding is what women plan for, and they want to shoot for as close to their dream as they can. The groom is just a part of that process that they have to include in the overall plans. And after I went back to work, there was about 5 months until the magic day.

The basics were covered at this point. It was going to be at a church that her grandmother still attends in her family's original hometown as opposed to Broken Arrow. The Queen was going crazy getting all the little details put together and for me, I haven't a clue, which is where they wanted me. After all, my job is to show up. I'm sure she could go on for a year writing just about the wedding and all that went into it.

Me? I was just happy to with her. The wedding was exciting, and I had my own bits of things to take care of as well. After all, we had to live somewhere, so I was taking care of my duties by seeking out an apartment to get us started in. A place where the two of us were going to begin a new life together as a family.

It seems so long ago, and it's nothing short of amazing as to how much can happen in only a few years. Next month, we hit nine years of being married, and those nine years were probably the most eventful I've ever had. Learning doesn't stop after you get out of school. Every day something happens to add to your knowledge and experiences of life. You learn to depend on yourself and depend on others and learning to find the balance of when to rely on each of those.

One thing I know is that you can't live your life alone. It's just not possible. Hermits manage to get by alone, but they miss a lot that this world has to offer. Everyone survives symbiotically reliant on others around them, and through those relationships we grow and change and continue to become a little bit better (or worse) every day. My life is what I've made of it, and in retrospect, I can see how every decision has lead me to different ends, and I reflect on what I might do different should individual occasions arise again.

Sometimes, I wonder if I would want to change how things played out over my life. Would I try to hook up with the Queen in high school? Would I go to college? Would I have taken the chance to hit West Point? But with each change, there would have been changes to everything else that happened. What about all the good things that have occurred in my life? Would I want those good things to change? Rock Girl is the way she is because of when she was born, how we were when she was growing up, and the experiences she was given based on our experiences at the time, and she is a wonderful child. I wouldn't want her to change at all, but changing my past would change her.

Same would go for the other two as well. Changing anything about our pasts would alter their makeup and personalities, and even the circumstances under which they were conceived which would change their entire being. Would I want them to change? No, I wouldn't. I would want a better life for them, but I want them just the way they are. That means that I can't change anything.

Life is a delicate balance of everything that happens. No, I'm not a Zen master or anything, but that seems to me to be a basic truth. But no, I don't subscribe to the idea that when a butterfly dies in central Africa that it affects me over here or there is some all powerful force of microscopic beings that holds the universe together. But we do make a life for ourselves that means something to us and those around us. It's that very idea that makes the movie "It's a Wonderful Life" so powerful.

Anyway, such are the thoughts that occur to me now after nine years, where at the time, I was just excited to be getting married to the girl I loved more than anything in the world. And although people have trouble believing it, we had no idea we were only a few months away from having another girl drop into our lives and rock our world in ways we never thought possible.