Bad Coffee or Vodka Cranberry

Time to Read 5-7 minutes

In the Summer Olympics, the 100-meter sprinters get a huge share of the glory, but the distance runners seem to come back year after year and don’t hit their peaks until their late thirties. I guess it is the same in everyday life. I always viewed life as a marathon, not a sprint.

On a trip years ago with the family to Italy, I discovered one of Italy’s secrets to a long life, “é tutto bene,” meaning “it’s all good.” You drive fast, I drive slow, it’s all good. In the early 80’s, I discovered the book Success Through a Positive Mental Attitude, and it helped shape the way I think. Maybe this is why the Italians seem so happy. “é tutto bene” is their form of PMA. I wish I’d read PMA in high school. Bad things happen to all of us, but the trick is to not let those speed bumps in the road define you. Don’t think that just because I don’t mention bad stuff along the way, it doesn’t happen. Also, I can get a little wordy sometimes, so stop reading if you get bored. If you are curious about me, you can find me at https://dalethomas.com/. However, I tend to put the good stuff at the end.

I met and hung out with some great people in high school. However, I’m amazed at how many other great people from our class at Northwest High School in Indianapolis I didn’t know. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed our class’s informal gatherings at local pubs and on the old community networking website, Classmates.com, to get to know classmates better, reconnect with others I’ve known for a long time, or just recognize that there are a lot of good life stories out there.

The same goes for Facebook. Although it’s changed in recent years, it’s brought me stories about lunch-table friends, classmates on the golf team, and even old girlfriends. The good part of FB is that it jolted me to look back and realize that everything happens for a reason. The girlfriend break-ups that knock you off the horse help you empathize with your boy when he gets dumped, you remember your HS apprehensions, so you push them a little so they have no regrets, and you remember the “end of the world as I know it” feelings and help them keep life in perspective. Plus, there’s the eye roll…é tutto bene.

Some of my friends and loved ones hated high school and college. For me, I loved high school and college. I’ve tried to put my finger on why, but have come to the conclusion that I just liked the carefree lifestyle of education. A lot of people ask me (mostly my male friends) how I could have gone to Purdue University with such an unbalanced male-to-female ratio. I didn’t attend General Motors Institute and Wabash because of a minimal or no female student population. At first glance, the ratios seem rather daunting. In the early 70’s, Purdue had 30,000 students, split at 10,000 women and 20,000 men. Starting with my class, the ratio of women to men began to rise toward 1:1. However, 19,189 of those men wore a pocket protector, a slide ruler on their belt (yes, I said slide ruler), never dated a woman, and talked engineering jargon nonstop… é tutto bene.

College-wise, life was good, except for the 46 hours I spent as a senior, when I switched majors too many times and didn’t like taking classes that met before 10 am or during afternoon Cubs games. Summers, I worked as a Road Brakeman for the Penn Central Railroad, traveling by rail, making up trains, and setting off cars around Indiana, Illinois, and Ohio. I saved $5,000 each summer (a lot of money in the early ’70s), so I made it out of Purdue debt-free while maintaining a nice college lifestyle…é tutto bene

After undergrad at Purdue, West Lafayette, I took the best job I ever had. No, it wasn’t in plastics as suggested to Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate. I became a lifeguard. With an Industrial Engineering degree, I was a darn good sun-bleached blond, red swimsuit lifeguard and found the perfect tan, you know the kind that’s between your toes. I had a pleasant daily routine: golf, test the water, clean the pool, lifeguard, nap, disco, sleep, repeat. Although I didn’t have sufer ripped abs…é tutto bene.

Eventually, my transmission went out on my ’65 Ford Galaxy (60/40 seats, carry everything I own in it, get my head alongside the engine block and gap the plugs with a fifty-cent piece), so I decided to get a real job at St. Vincent Hospital in Indianapolis. I couldn’t fathom how people made it through the day in an office without a nap so I turned to coffee. This was my first introduction, albeit Folger’s Instant, to coffee….é tutto bene

During my stint at St. Vincent and a research position at the Indiana Hospital Association, I finished Grad School. Seeking adventure, Lynn and I recklessly moved to Pittsburgh for a Big Eight, now Big Four, position. Much like the Baltimore Colts and about the same time, we escaped to Cincinnati. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me, you dastardly Public Accounting. However, Pittsburgh eventually led Lynn to meet her mentor, Howie, and that alone shaped our lives…é tutto bene.

Eventually, we settled in Carmel (Indiana, not California). Then after 20 yrs. In healthcare consulting, after 20 years dabbling in commercial and residential real estate, I decided to become a writer. My first novel is a reluctant-hero adventure titled Dangerously  Overcaffeinated.

Find it on Amazon https://a.co/d/0euMl1wv

The inspiration for the main character in my book sprang from the idea that a lot of guys have that one friend a wife doesn’t like and thinks is a bad influence (you’ll read about that guy in my post, He’s a cheatin’ You Laddie). So I invented Nicky Blade, the guy he tells her he’s hanging out with at the casino, bar, or on an overstay of a golf trip. “Honey, I know it’s 2 a.m., but Nicky drove to the Casino and wouldn’t bring me home. Plus, he borrowed $500 dollars.” 

Nicky eventually took on more heroic characteristics, and his old traits and tendencies morphed into those of Royce Crocker, his best friend, a seaplane pilot. Nicky is sort of a cross between Jimmy Buffett and Jack Reacher. There’s a Dead Sea Scrolls subplot throughout the adventure, along with a threat to the US financial system. No, the threats are not Congress raising the capital gains tax, nor another subprime meltdown caused by fundamentalists.

é tutto bene.