Writing your own obituary

 HOOKER: I wrote my obituary over the weekend.

BEAR: My God!

HOOKER: There's nothing wrong with me. I was watching a discussion on TV and a shrink recommended it as a valuable exercise for anyone. Boy was he right.

BEAR: Tell me more.

HOOKER: Writing your obit is more or less telling your own life story, and my memory brought up experiences I hadn't thought about in years. Decades. I ended up with far too many pages to publish as an obituary but more importantly with insights I never had before.

BEAR: Can you share them?

HOOKER: How unfocused and lost I was until the Army changed me. But not in the way the commercials suggest. I was the front desk clerk to a small company of Russian linguists.

BEAR: You speak Russian?

HOOKER: No. The job didn't require it. But I had a Top Secret Codeword security clearance because I typed reports sent to the Pentagon. 

BEAR: This was after your undergraduate degree? 

HOOKER: I dropped out in the middle of my sophomore year. I had no idea what I was doing. I skipped classes to perform Burl Ives songs in the student union. The draft was active then. Joining the Army seemed like the most practical option I had.

BEAR: What did your parents think of all this?

HOOKER: Think of the worst response you can. Now double it. Anyway, since I had some college, my recruiter put me into the Army Security Agency. That's how I ended up with the linguists. They were three or four years older than me. Big brothers. Typically a linguist had a Masters degree in the humanities and was working on a doctorate when he was about to be drafted. Only science majors got deferments. So they joined the Security Agency to avoid being a foot soldier.

BEAR: I knew a few colleagues who had enlisted to avoid the draft.

HOOKER: The other important thing in my Army experience is I learned I had an above average capacity for alcohol. I could go drink for drink with the linguists and not make an ass of myself. And I entertained them with folk songs and collaborated in writing anti Army songs. (Singing) "I don't want your clearance, mister. / I don't want your World Wide Badge. / All I want is a pair of my civies, / And the freedom I once had." (Stops singing.) I was accepted into their club as a junior member, and this became the most intense educational experience of my life. In the Army!

BEAR: Remarkable.

HOOKER: To me, it seemed like these guys had read everthing. They argued about Shakespeare and Melville and Hemingway and countless authors I never heard of. They argued about films. About politics and religion. They made being an intellectual sexy! They had so much enetgy, it was catching. I started reading "the great books," trying to catch up with them. By the time I was discharged, I was ready to join them. I went back to college as a history major, now planning to spend my life in academia.

BEAR: The most remarkable story about military experience I ever heard.

HOOKER: That recruiter who put me in the Security Agency was probably just filling a quota but he changed my life. 

BEAR: Did you keep in touch with any of your Army big brothers?

HOOKER: I tried to for a while. Friendships in the workplace seem to peter out if moved. Do you have contact with any of your former colleagues at Portland State?

BEAR: I tried but eventually they petered out, like you say.

HOOKER: You and I became friends before we became colleagues

BEAR: We were lucky that way. 

HOOKER: It didn't hurt that our wives became tight friends.

BEAR: : Certainly not. 

HOOKER: They had more in common than we do.

BEAR: If our wives hadn't gotten along, what would've happened?

HOOKER: Who knows? Who cares? It didn't happen

BEAR: I'm just curious.

HOOKER: I applaud curiosity. Especially in a Republican.

BEAR: There is no Republican party any more.

(End)