A Carefree Youth

Something many of us remember having. Sort of.

When I was a young adult, the world was full of possibilities and I was unburdened by irksome thoughts of insurance rates, taxes, and health. From a point of view characteristic of the latter years of my career, it seems my youthful adulthood was relatively free of responsibilities and vexations.

But I know that’s untrue.

Frugal and ambitious, I lived by way of several jobs from minimum wage delivery driving, restaurant help, etc., to probably the best job of my early 20s, reactor operator at a chemical plant on the ship channel. For a young guy without a college degree it paid well, and it was my first paycheck job that actually required some analytical thinking.

And I thought nighttime was pretty cool with all the catwalk lights and flares from the plants along the channel.

During those years, I played drums here and there with various people and for a few years had a girlfriend that, um, occupied my thoughts quite a lot (not necessarily in a good way).

So, life was full. Weekends often involved trips to Austin to visit friends and when the chemical plant succeeded in putting me in the hospital for a month with burns, I decided to move to Austin and go to college. I was 22 and, having been out on my own for a few years, I decided I could pay for it myself.

Moving in with a musician friend and starting at UT felt great – I had purpose! And living and college expenses necessitated generating income from a few things, but the main thing that got me through school was a taxicab. There were a few guys that drove my cab when I wasn’t driving it, or fixing it. It was a full time job, as was school.

And I had a college girlfriend who also occupied a lot of my thoughts. Towards the end of that time, I was audited by both the TEC and the IRS (and came out unscathed).

The point of all that is that, despite sometimes seeming like the good old days, and there were fun times, those years were hardly absent of responsibilities, anxieties, frustrations, etc. Most of my compañeros had similar young adulthoods.

In our everyday lives we all have situations that are unresolved and bring with them unease and apprehension. That’s just part of living in the present. And I think that’s the clue to why we can remember the past as fondly as we often do: we already know how all those unknowns turned out, so any related anxiety is gone.

Now, from the vantage point of retirement, I can think back to my career years and remember many a worrisome situation, a problem with my work or with people involved. The thing I most appreciate now is that none of that matters anymore. My only devil presently is whipping myself to get another blog out, and nobody else is making me do that.