danger
when I was seventeen going on eighteen, I was sure I was going to grow up and be a Marine officer. I read everything I could about being a Marine officer, not just the recruitment papers - as I recall, there wasn't much of that, you were either already gung-ho or there was no use in selling you - but biographies of Marine officers, magazine articles about them, the Encyclopedia Britannica article about the Corps. I think I not only knew who the Commandant was, but also the General who was responsible for the boot camps. I think I knew what each of them had done during Korea and World War II. I still remember reading that the life expectancy of a Marine lieutenant during a beach operation was twenty seconds, and I remember the smile I grew reading that. yes, this was the life for me. of course it wasn't! don't be silly! I was born with a heart murmur, a hole in the wall between my ventricles. you couldn't drive a truck through it, but a good Marine might've been able to thread a Jeep through it. no, I wasn't going to be a Marine officer. but the point of this anecdote is that smile. ever since I decided to defy whatever the doctors told my father, oh hell, maybe ever since I was born (remember the cave?), I've been a danger junky. I was a boy! I ran, I fell, I jumped, I climbed trees, I figured out how to get from tree to tree without climbing down, I stood at the edge of a cliff, I climbed cliffs. as I told the physical therapist yesterday, I've done a lot of foolish things in my life. the common thread is defying danger, defying being scared, and ultimately defying death. so far death hasn't collected me. I guess it can wait. but the funny thing is, I don't regret a one of those defiances. they're all related by that smile. whatever I've done, this was the life for me.
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