Fate is still in charge

I realized I missed putting this column on last week.

All of us look at our lives as very complex things. Blood, sweat, and tears have all been expended to get us where we are. There is planning, worrying, re-arranging and more planning. We all have goals, hopes, and dreams. Goals, hopes, and dreams change as we age. When I was ten years old I wanted to be the next Ed Podolak. (If you know who Ed Podolak is give yourself twenty-five bonus points.) When I was twenty I wanted to be the next Steven Spielberg. Now that I am forty-three I want to be the next in line at Dairy Queen, some goals are more achievable than others.
I had no idea five years ago I would be writing a humor column once a week for an honest to goodness newspaper (how many readers just looked over the top of the newspaper and commented to their spouse “Oh, he’s trying to be funny.”). I had no idea ten years ago I would be an assistant principal at an intermediate center (heck, ten years ago I had never heard of an intermediate center). Fifteen years ago I would not have guessed I would have three children (there are times each week I look into the back of the minivan with mild shock). Twenty years ago I would not have thought I would be a happily married man (most every woman I knew twenty years ago would have gotten a good giggle out of the idea as well). Every one of those things may never have come to pass if my father hadn’t shaved off his mustache on a fateful night in 1967. More on that later.
We first get our educations. Some have a diploma from an institution of higher learning. Some people earned that diploma with hard work and tireless intellectual curiosity. Some people earned that diploma by writing the tuition checks, showing up in class on a semi-regular basis and consuming large amounts of cereal malt beverages with friends. (Since my mother reads this column I would like to go on record and say I was somewhere in the middle of this work/play college student continuum.)
Sometimes it is not what you know, but rather who you know that makes the biggest difference. If I knew George Clooney I would be more likely to get my screenplay made into a multi-Oscar winning motion picture. I don’t know George Clooney. I do know the morning disc jockey on KSSH so I can get an Elvis at Eight song dedicated to my daughter. Which is more important, really, the excited face of my nine year old girl hearing her name on the radio or the fame of writing a smash hit movie? It’s a no brainer. I want the fame. I’ll buy her her own stupid radio station after I cash the checks.
Actually, we put too much stock into what we do on purpose to make our lives what we want. Things just happen. Back to my father and his mustache. He was the city manager in McCook, Nebraska. The town was celebrating some sort of centennial and many of the men in town had grown facial hair to look more pioneer-like as they drove their cars around town wearing suits. (I didn’t say it made sense I just said they were doing it.) He had a job interview with the Hutchinson, Kansas city commission. He drove into town a day early, that night in the hotel he decided he’d shave off his mustache. It turned out the commission was a little split on who to hire. They chose my father on a three to two vote. Later he had a discussion with the lone woman on the commission. She had voted for hiring him. He told her he had had a mustache. Her response was she wouldn’t have voted for him if he had shown up with a mustache, after all it was 1967 and hippies had mustaches.If my father had not gotten the job in Hutchinson I would not have met the friends who were so influential in my youth. My sister wouldn’t have worked for the museum in town and fixed me up with the cute assistant curator. I would not have married her. I would not have moved to Dodge City. I probably would not have become a teacher. If I was never a teacher there is no way I would have become a principal. If I wasn’t a principal I wouldn’t have given a certain young man an entire week of recess detention. So there is at least one person who wishes my dad had lost the stupid razor.