It's funny how seemingly unrelated things can ignite a moment of reflection ....

The summer of 1971 I was 18 about to be 19.  I had just completed my Freshman year at Trinity University and was back home in Midland for the summer.  The previous 9 months while at Trinity had a significant impact on my future ,,, I didn't have a clue at the time, of the magnitude of change and personal growth those nine months would ultimately have. 

It was during that time that I discovered I really did have a penchant for computers on a large scale and more significantly, I had the opportunity to explore what that could mean to my future.  That nine months cemented for me my future career.   I was much better with computers than I was with physics ... and I began to see that I could possibly make money programming computers and not just have to nail my degree in physics to the service station wall where I would be pumping gas. 

In my first ever "programming class" (COBOL for those that remember such archaic languages) I met a young lady that later in the year I began to pursue with some serious intent.  Basically I was happily trapped by my love of computers and the heart stopping power of long blond hair and deep grey eyes and a girl that wanted to know how to get a Snoopy Calendar out of the computer for her dorm room wall..  I never had a chance.

During that nine months I also discovered that my long affair with very loud "electrified" music was over and I wanted to "go acoustic".   So in the summer of 1971, I sold every bit of electric guitar equipment I owned and bought a shiny new Martin D-18 guitar.  I'm pretty sure I owed additional money besides my trade-in but hey it was a "Martin" and there simply wasn't anything better ... it was worth the price! 

Flash forward now to present day ...

Yesterday was June 2, 2009 ... a milestone in my life ... Carolyn and I celebrated 36 years of marriage.
Today is June 3, 2009 ... another milestone .  Today I celebrate 35 completed years working for IBM.

... and yesterday I spent a couple of hours in a small guitar shop talking to the resident guitar repairman ... we talked about the fact that the 1970's were basically the absolute bottom of the Martin Guitar Company's quality control ... and that D-18 I had bought almost 38 years ago needed some fairly serious repair work to get it in "playable" shape ... it never played or sounded quite right ... but hey ... it was a Martin and I was 19 years old and just starting to find myself ... it never occurred to me to file registration papers ... so on the suggestion of the shop owner, I contacted Martin Guitar to see if I had actually registered the guitar those many years ago ... I hadn't ... but the customer service representative suggested if I could send some pictures of me with the guitar from those long ago days I could still possibly be recorded as the registered owner and thus qualify for warranty coverage on the repairs.

and that brings me to the REFLECTIONS ...

I did in fact find a photograph of me and that guitar back in the 1970's ... I had lots of hair then, and I was very young ... looking at that picture I realized several things ... many years have passed, I have had a great career and will be one of the last of the generations that will retire from a job having only worked for one company and with a defined benefit pension.  I have been very happily married to one woman with blond hair and deep grey eyes for 36 years.  We have children and grandchildren that are healthy and happy with what I expect to be safe and secure futures in front of them and ... if I don't look too closely in the mirror I still see that 19 year old kid with the shiny new Martin ... so ... to me at least, it's amazing how so many critical circumstances can be traced back to a certain point in time in one's life ... and how looking at just one old photograph can bring all of the various threads together into a single tapestry.