I have always been surprised at the tricks life plays on us. My father worked in the truck business writing parts catalogues, mostly for Diamond T in Chicago. Naturally, I vowed never to be like my father. So I wound up retiring in 2006 after 13 years in the truck business, writing service and operators’ manuals for Freightliner Trucks in Portland OR.

I spent my first 17 years around Chicago (Oak Park and Lombard, mostly) and at 17, I felt that was enough. My next stop was Kenyon, where I spent four years trying to get somewhere else. Once again, I found myself returning to the place where I started, and that was because my daughter. Laule’a, wound up graduating from Kenyon in 2010. Guess what? Kenyon turned out to be a pretty nice place after all.

Somewhere in those four confused years, I learned something about how to think, how to write, and that it was just possible to make the world a better place. My thanks to all who put up with me in those times, but particularly Bruce Haywood, Edmund P. Hecht, Virgil Aldrich, Irving Feldman, Franklin Miller, John Yolton, and Tom Edwards.

Without Kenyon, I would never have survived those intervening years. I got a DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) grant and worked and studied in Germany, 1962-65. This grant was similar to a Fulbright but funded by what was then the West German government.

Back to New York, 1965-69, where I was a welfare caseworker, and then to the San Francisco Bay Area, 1969-87, where I drove for the Municipal Railway, and worked in many warehouses, various cab companies, Pacific Bell, Lawrence Berkeley Lab, and Transamerica Airlines.

By that time, I had reinvented myself as a technical writer (thank Kenyon for making me write), and that led to another writing job with Hawaiian Airlines from 1987-90. Along the way, I had gotten married, divorced, and married again. My daughter was born in 1987, and that’s why she has lived her life with an Hawaiian name.

In 1991, I acquired what is now known as a Mild Traumatic Brain Injury, which scrambled even further what little brains I have left. My wife, Jinx Kuehn, surprises me every day with her humor and devotion that I have done relatively little to deserve.

I still am doing what I can to make a nuisance of myself and see through their games (whoever they are). That, also, I think I must owe to Kenyon.

My wife Jinx, my daughter Laule’a, and me at the Viqarunnisa Nun School in Dhaka, Bangladesh where Laule’a ’10 was teaching on a Fulbright grant.