jerrag

I have lead a rather full; if not interesting life, growing up on a farm of the old school where electricity was a dream, running water meant we were faster bringing the bucket from the windmill to the house. The one room school that I attended for the first six years of my education left me with an education that today's student can only dream of. Where all eight grades had their lessons in the same room, one or two students per grade, you were able to absorb eighth grade subjects while staying in your own first or second grade. A move to town was enlightening, we had electricity, and indoor plumbing, wow we thought we had hit it rich!

As I grew and started a family, I found that my failure to finish High School was indeed the stumbeling block that folk say it was. After moving about in the upper mid-west working pumping gas and later at a factory building display racks for stores it became very apparent that if I wished to advance myself I had to do something completely different. My lovely wife of six months suggested that perhaps I consider the military!

Well it didn't dawn on me until I was in the US Army Basic Combat training that perhaps her desire for my advancement was in fact a desire to be free to explore other men, perhaps in search of someone with a better car, or house. That thought gave me the strength to finish basic and advanced training, and when I was again with my good wife, I found that I was indeed just thinking the worse, and on her first visit to Fort Leonard Wood Mo, our son was concieved. I was not destine to see him however until I had expierenced the horror that was the Vietnam War.

At any rate, if I were to continue, I may well put the reader to sleep with my going on about life and the good as well as the bad that I discovered in people during my eight years in the Army, and the twenty two years I spent wearing he Badge of a Police Officer, eight of those years wearing the badge of Chief of Police.

An accident while on duty put me on the disabled list, and Workers Comp, in their caring way ordered me to college! What a wonderful order that was, I found that while studying the Law to become a paralegal that I had a slight ability to write fiction. Now the degree that I came away with was about worth the paper it was written on, as nobody in the Great Midwest seemed to want to hire a fifty something old fart with a new diploma in his had even though I managed to maintain a 4.0 gap.

About ten years ago I began to write fiction, even found some success in selling my work and have been published in a few magazines as well as having one story published in a Sci-Fi anthology about time travel. However the injury that I sustained so many years ago kept getting worse, and the four surgeries that followed finally put me pretty much out of it, depending on very strong narcotic's to get through the day with only slight pain. The side effects, however have pretty much killed the creativity that I enjoyed in my hay-day of writing.

So now I spend my days tinkering with old computers, fixing them up for my friends and family, even selling a few when the need for more funds arise. I do enjoy the feeling of seeing a basket case that I pick up on Ebay for a few bucks become a useable machine once again, and I manage to stay about three years behind the improvment in systems for my wife of 44 years and myself. I love seeing my three grandchildren but since they live a couple hundred miles north of me in flood damage Minot ND, I don't see as much of them as I would like. The eldest of the three has graduated High School and is working on her own in a neighboring city, the youngest is just learning to crawl.

Life is good, I just wish I could enjoy it more, but I am offering you a bit of the horror that I write here on this wonderful site.