Comments:
It’s hard to say what has happened to the last 20 years.
After I left MHS I went on to college at Michigan State to study advertising. I had a great time, but I didn’t learn a whole lot. I should have been clued into the fact that I was taking go no where classes when I would look around the room and everyone else in the class was a scholarship athlete except me and one other kid that kept sticking his erasure in his ear and then licking it when he thought no one was watching.
Actually, I did switch majors five times, but eventually switched back to advertising after I had worked at a television station making ads for about a year.
After I graduated I went on somewhere close to fifty job interviews before I was finally hired by an Ad agency in Detroit. Ironically out of the fifty interviews not a single person asked to see my diploma or even asked if I went to school. As a matter of fact, they didn’t even ask to see my drivers license to see if I was over 16, at the time I still looked like I was just approaching puberty.
My dreams of becoming a high powered ad writer were short lived. I worked in the field for two years, got fired once due to a Faygo ad campaign that I thought was hilarious but the people at Faygo thought to be “highly offensive” and I was “wasting their time with my debauchery”. They really used the word debauchery to describe my idea. Debauchery, I always thought that was one of those words that was strictly used in spelling tests and had no functional application in standard speech.
To this day I still feel that I was in the right, but what can you do. I have a decent job now that has nothing to do with creating and sparking interest in third tier cola products and no one outside of a three state radius has ever heard of Faygo.
After I left the advertising world I went on to work at UPS for several years. It was a good job, but does it ever get cold in the winter time. I quickly realized that I had to find something that was a little bit warmer, and preferably a job that hired women that looked like women. Most of the women that worked at the plant I was at were that kind of androgynous “Pat” type looking things. Either burly woman or heavy set guy with man boobs, it was really a coin toss until you could see if they would walk into the girls or guys bathroom.
This somehow lead me to nursing. I went back to school, graduated and started working at a hospital in Detroit. Not listening to my dad’s advice, I dipped my pen in the company ink and got married to one of my coworkers. We had a daughter together. That was probably the only positive thing that came from that whole mess. We got divorced and I wound up with custody of my daughter (Camdyn).
I’ve since been remarried. Again, refusing to listen to my dad’s advice I met Heidi at work, but I made a far better choice this time. It’s true, you get married the second time out of mutual love and respect. I have no idea why I got married the first time, maybe I was horny.
Heidi and I have a great relationship, she is the best woman that I have ever met. Shortly after we began dating her two children from a previous marriage (Spencer and Mackenzie) were diagnosed with juvenile onset Tay-Sachs disease, which is a rare terminal genetic disorder that slowly robs your body and mind of everything.
Despite this horrible diagnosis Heidi made a decision that she wasn’t going to weep for her misfortune or the misfortune of her children but instead she was going to make everyday precious, make everyday count. And she has.
Heidi and I got married a few years back, and it has been a whirlwind since that time. Between completely tearing down our house and rebuilding a new one, taking multiple family trips all over the US, having another child (Trenton) and somehow maintaining our sanity has been a fulltime job.
Tragically we lost both Spencer and Mackenzie over the course of this last year. It has been difficult for the whole family, but I have never seen Heidi lose faith in herself or humanity, and she still views life as it should be; a precious gift that we all too often take for granted.
We do our best to live everyday to the fullest, not getting bogged down with the little inconveniences, because you never know when your last conversation may be with someone, or the last time that you may see someone’s face, or tell someone that you love them. So you may as well make them all count. And we do.
