Melvyn Foster:  

Life Civilian again,no place held much interest till I apartmented 3 blocks from Hollywood and Vine,working medic. Age of Aquarius,I was fairminded Establishment with 2 hippy-girl roommates I took to Woodstock 1969. At 31 I overnight met and married in Mexico an Orange County CA. schoolteacher 40,and shifted to there.Exactly 7 years later,up here,her heart quit,broke mine,left me raising our boys 6 and 5 by myself because anything else was unthinkable.My guys are 35 and 34 now,a small businesssman and pro driver and semi-pro footballer with NFL eyes on the punting/kicking foot no one in the NFL can come close to;55-65-yd.punt avg.,80 long. I've spent the last 10 years raising a granddaughter from infancy so her dad and 8-year stepmom can work.I use memory and audiovisual CDs to teach her Spanish,Italian,French and German,with root Latin later.That is a door to multilingual literate communications and the good adult life I want for her.Curing my liver,Interferon gave me pulmonary fibrosis and my lungs went from normal to serious bronchial scarring in 20 weeks and I had to lose part of my right lung to see the damage done because I wasn't told of that side effect.That loss was very late July,just as Interferon ended taking off 20 lbs. to put me at 190 for once in many years.Since then,something backfired,because in those 120 days (12/1/05,today) I've added 60 lbs.,to be 67,6'1",250.I lost my taste for it and cold-turkeyed ending drinking - if you don't enjoy it,what's the point?-,dry 38 years now,and on 4/5/05 I cold-turkey quit smoking after 55 years with no twinges since,so I know it can be done. I am on a steroid for life,to breathe all right,and my new bed is an Rx hospital bed to sleep mildly reclined,but I don't have near the health issues a lot of other peple have,so I count my blessings and have coffee.I have no nefarity up my sleeve in doing gold membership.I see names I haven't heard in 50+ years and others that may lead to still others it would be nice to meet again,and I wouldn't rule out meeting new persons as well. But I live in Olympia, and any in-person coffee meet has me coming north,preferably to a restaurant to keep address privacies intact till the other person's confidence declares exception to policy.Living my adult life as I have under the golden rule of the 7 major faiths of the civilized world,I tend to find any other type of social interaction re meeting to be beyond the comfort zone, and in finding pushy persons in bygone years too dense to understand the hint,I have broken off associating with them by telling them I do not do that with any person who even resembles a male squatter or female standing up using the same tree as their dog.I don't care how dense someone is,that will register.MWF School No crush.Two John Hay ES girls were a hair's breadth from equal billing as cherished friends;one,one contact 43 years ago,since family-move separation April 1950;other girl just reconnected via another.Top teachers?PSJH Music,Ed Kinney.Developed my 3-octave voice and vibratto,instilled all forms of intelligible music in me,made sure I knew the masters,their every work,their bios.Ed and I were friends from Sept.1950 to his dying day 35+ years later at 80+ y.o.a.Other teacher was '52-'54 English teacher Billie Putnam.As just herself she quietly lit a literacy fire in me without which I would not now be a retired multilingual MICP-4 Medic/night med school instructor able to talk classic lit/other liberal-arts academe shop with those instructors.What she gave me was a life to feel good about in my now senior years.I could not have been the only one so blessed.She has more than earned eternity in peace when the time comes to go Home.She is sainted.Would I do it all over again?Probably,but with a couple of changes,like to a Trauma P.A. and,later,teaching days.My funniest time was a PSJH science test,wherein my gas let go in a long,shrill,high-C squeal at 13.C'est si bon.If nuts to do it is craziest,that was April 1953 when I said to 2 girls if we couldn't have a cigaret on school property at lunchtime and faculty could,wizz on it,and I did,under the faculty lunchroom door with the girls and other teens watching not serenely,walking away just soon enough to not be caught.I was 14 then.No nerve,"Qui'ils mangent de la brioche,"French for,"Let them eat cake."But a good one.Today I might well join their laughing at the i...Expand for more