Hank Carey:  

...a long and lonesome road. This life of mine. So when you have rested perhaps you will walk with me a while? You ask me where and what I have been doing and I say, I still contemplate this mystery. ...in the third grade I wet my pants the tiny blond girl next to me offered her coat as I left the room. Donna...they still make songs about her. Skinny seventh grade clown with older brothers to protect me in the halls I challenged the bullies to take me on and leave that kid soon to become my best friend. Jim incredibly mild mannered later drafted hit by friendly fire then sent home to be alone. In all these years I've heard the music of his voice but once. ...transition from 8th grade to 9th grade is to this day unrivaled when compared to anything that I have achieved since. Not that I have accomplished all that much equivalent to what is considered success today. We can speak of our High school days and say they were the best of times and the worst of times. To be sure physical and emotional environment forges enduring images in the hearts and minds of the young. A good thing because there are some of us that can only see our former educational institutions in old pictures or our memories. The fact that Santa Clara High school was knocked down and robbed of its identity for the sake of progress is ludicrous. I still imagine the building, so many times on so many mornings the evening events or just hanging out. I see it, tall and proud solid the entrance waiting with the kids waiting for the bell. I remember my freshman year the years between and on through my senior year. Graduation. More tradition in one brick than there will ever be in that other place. Not misplaced exasperation towards the greed that razed such a proud building into oblivion. The great evil that exists in the world today will not fade until gain is removed from its plate. I wonder at the insanity of progress. Maybe it's all my imagination but I think not. I believe, metaphorically speaking, that what happened on graduation day back in 1965...the final bell...racing up that road getting ahead leaving the area becoming doctors lawyers and dentists. I hesitated and found myself alone in the middle of life. You heard the starting gun I must have been daydreaming. One older brother makes four with three left to walk this lonely road to its horizon. Lost track of relatives almost raised one son and I even lost track of his butt for a while. Four brothers the Clan Carey some would say were born in hell. Kicked the legendary gift horse in the teeth so many times it finally stopped coming round. I've been thrown from a few fine handmade saddles, saddles particular to the horses I rode alone along untold miles of barbed wire fence in Montana cattle country. A cowboy...a bet taken. Maybe just maybe I was drunk at that family reunion from the dark side. Horses cows leather and weather the hardest work I've ever known. Rain is one thing but the constant drizzle that goes on and on and on in western Washington is misery incarnate . For this cowboy the incessant dampness and gray skies was a formula for suicide or at the very least running screaming. I hear the weather pattern has changed since I've been gone.... The bone numbing dampness is why I quit Boeing Aircraft 3 times. As a wind tunnel operator/model maker I watched several multi-million dollar models go whirling through the tunnel to be reduced to scrap, including the now defunct SST. The tool and die shop was similar to the one where Conner squashes the Terminator under the hydro-press. This shop was not quite as exciting just a bunch of weed smoking fun loving misfits. My third and finally final attempt to work at Boeing was in the cabinet shop building those crates like the one in which they stored the Ark of the Covenant. Endless warehouses. Boeing was quite the adventure. The many different characters. People came from literally everywhere. Made some good friends. I helped one fellow employee build a boat in his basement. He was killed in a car accident shortly after we finished it...never even got a chance to float it. I loved that man. Almost murdered once well-nigh killed a few times and maybe should have been. My cousin the big Norwegian ranch boss fired me one bright sunny afternoon so I joined the Army, had to, they burned my draft board right to the ground. Right now I can hear that country song by Dierks Bentley A Long Trip Alone. Regardless of the places that I have haunted or whatever I have done, nothing so far outshines those extraordinary days at good old Santa Clara High...Expand for more