Okay, so it's nearly 3 AM and I'm wide awake. I've been trying to clean up four distinct piles of files and papers in my office for the past seven hours. The papers, I've discovered date back to the 1960s and earlier.
There are valentines from my father to my mother. From the names of my siblings he signed they had to be pre-1956.
But the one that prompted this violation of my first principle of writing, was dated 1983. It is a certificate from the Maryland State Police announcing my completion of the police firearms instructor school. For some reason that bit of memorabilia touched off a phrase that I've been asked countless times. And for an equal number of times I've been at a loss to answer, namely "what do you do?" It's a question that has intrinsic existentially defining connotations, the most important being "Who are you?"
I can tell you what people have called me - leaving out the obscenities.
Traveling in Manhattan many years ago with a Georgia State Police Officer and one of the most interesting of many interesting people I've known (whose day job in no way resembled what he really did for a living) and consider friends, I was dubbed "KGB" by a Russian expatriate as we emerged from an official looking car. The good man and his two companions disappeared as quickly and quietly as wild turkeys in a dimly lit woods. I'm not KGB.
The KGB consider me God knows what because I co-authored a series of articles on our lack of strategic Sea Lift and why it would take us six months to deploy a suitable number of troops and materiel a few years prior to Desert Storm. They also had copies of a newsletter I wrote in their archives...according to a reliable source, now deceased.
For years and to this day, my friend's sons consider me CIA. I'm not.
I had to take an early leave from a police course on automatic weapons being conducted by one of the finest teachers I've ever had - including nuns, Christian Brothers, Jesuit Priests, high school, college and graduate school professors - a former Secret Service instructor by the name of John Recknor. My classmates from a variety of departments along the Atlantic corridor swore I was a "spook." I wasn't.
Animal Rights fanatics hate me because I spent a number of years as an advocate for biomedical research and asked them at a news conference if as they claimed that they condemn medical research performed on animals because it was not relevant to humans, "did they approve of it for the medical benefits it provided animals?"
I was kicked out of the Outdoor Writers Association because as a ghost writer I refused to submit tear sheets of the articles I wrote that were published in outdoors, shooting and hunting magazines under other people's names. They said if they waived the rule for me, they would have to do it for all the outdoor "ghost writers." I asked how many were in the organization and was told "you are the only one." Ah the logic of the media.
Back before the media "sainthood" of the late Senator Ted Kennedy when he was considered by even his friends in Congress as perhaps the dumbest Member of that esteemed body, I got him totally ticked at me by publishing an analysis of one of his many anti-gun bills that demonstrated via textual analysis compared to his own published statements that the good fellow never read his own bill. It as truly interesting (and I admit gratifying) to notice his staffers pointing me out to the Senator at some function on the Hill.
Friends refer to me as something of a chef. I'm not. I cook left-overs. I did cook at my mother's restaurant for six years. I just followed her lead.
I've had street thugs claim I scared them. Must have mistaken me for someone else. Might have had something to do with the couple of individuals who tried to rob us and somehow got tossed out the door and into the street instead.
Lately I've been part of an amazing team that that developed an equally amazing technology that promises to bring some 2000 very good jobs to the Gulf Coast and reverse the trend of shipping U.S. dollars abroad in exchange for questionable quality shrimp. We've got an operating model up and running and once fully funded we'll show that premium quality shrimp can be raised at the rate of 10 million pounds a year right here in the U.S.A. I also built my son a primo bedroom, framed in the room, hung drywall, laid the tile floor, installed hardwood floors elsewhere in the house, am doing the bathroom remodel, plumbing and all, cook the meals, do the laundry and on and on and on.
So do I have an answer to that initial question or its collorary? Absolutely not. All I want to be is a good dad and soon, I hope, a good husband to a quite remarkable woman.
Told you not to write after midnight. Now I've got to get some sleep.
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