Long trips are dangerous things

They give you time to think, as you spend 13 hours at the wheel trying to keep them all on the pavement with the same forward vector. What with the passing of the Auld Soldier, I'm at one of those clichéd places in my life where I'm supposed to sit down and take stock. 24 hours of driving in two days gives you that chance.

To pass the time, I took along a lot of music - Cirque du Soleil soundtracks, Loreena McKinnit, and a 4 disk Harry Chapin collection. I like Harry, he can tell a good story, without being too in your face with his politics. This collection is interspersed with interview snippets. One caught my attention, where Harry is speaking about his grandfather.

"My grandfather was a painter. He died at age 88. He illustrated Robert Frost's first two books of poetry. He was looking at me one day and he said, `Harry, there's two kinds of tired. There's goodtired and there's bad-tired. Ironically enough, bad-tired can be a day in which you won, but you won other people's battles, you lived other people's days, other people's agendas and dreams, and when it's all over, there's very litte you in there, and when you hit the hay at night, you toss and turn, you don't settle easy.

Good-tired, ironically enough, can be a day in which you lost, but you knew you fought your battles, you chased your dreams, you lived your days. And when you hit the hay at night, you settle easy, you sleep the sleep of the just, and you can say, "Take me away."

Harry, all my life I wanted to be a painter. So I painted. God, I would have loved to have been more successful. But I painted and painted. And I am good-tired, and they can take me away."

What struck me was that I realized that when the Auld Soldier retired from the Army, he did so because he was bad-tired. He came of age during WWII and then fought in two wars which were un-appreciated and one in which his family was harassed and people like him actively excoriated. His Army was ill-used and broken, and he didn't see himself in a position to do much about it - so he left. He went back to school to finish out his PhD in Education, and ran into an astonishingly thick wall of hostility due to his background - enough so that he was told he'd have to settle for his EdTech, as "the military mind is not compatible with education." Heh. Mizzou came late to the anti-war protests (like, after the ground troops had been withdrawn) and I still think a chunk of his treatment was a milquetoast professoriate's circle-jerk of self-righteousness.

The Auld Soldier went to work for Columbia College, where he labored in a small office, looking at the college's needs and finding grants and writing them to get the money to meet those needs. He was pretty good at it. He, sitting in his office at a computer, raised as much money than the rest of the fund-raising efforts combined. He was happy with that. Doing something useful, it kept him busy, and was helping improve the school. But his success was his undoing, as it embarassed other, more powerful people who weren't nearly as good at finding money as the Auld Soldier. And thus did that bane of academia, jealousy and the quiet smear campaigns that go with it, raise it's ugly head. And the Auld Soldier was once again bad-tired. So he quit.

And he quit working for a paycheck, and started working for himself. Mind you, retired Colonel, paid-off house, independent funds, he didn't have to take a lifestyle hit to do it - not that his was an extravagant lifestyle.

He became a full-time Rotarian, effectively. Threw himself into something he loved, and was able to do it simply because he wanted to - and it allowed him to work with those things and people that gave him the greatest strength. He steered away from what politics there were in Rotary (stemming around some of the leadership positions at District and higher) happily toiled away in the trenches helping his club do good things, his District grow new clubs, and do Good Things for people near and far, whether it was wheelchairs, clean water, exchange students, literacy projects, the list is long.

And I know, from talking to him as he was coaching me on my upcoming Presidency of my own Rotary Club, that when he died last September, while he wasn't really ready to go - he did get to go to his final rest good-tired, and at peace.

What's the point? I am, and have been for months, maybe years, really, bad-tired.

And I'm contemplating what to do about that.

Which may mean changes here.  Maybe not, I don't know. I just know that I don't sleep well at night, and it's not just from the wear and tear of athletics and military service. My heart is tired and not in it anymore. Something needs to give.  And this is a blog, so I'm supposed to put my navel-gazing online, right?