Make Enquiry to Get Galvanized Pipe Fitting report as your requirement: https://market.biz/report/global-galvanized-pipe-fitting-market-hr/265435/#inquiry

Inventor(s): Robert Lenkinski (Dallas, TX) Assignee(s): 3D Imaging Partners (Toronto, Ontario, , ZZ) Law Firm: Quarles Brady LLP (6 non-local offices) Application No., Date, Speed: 15019417 on 02/09/2016 (826 days app to issue)

We all want a solid core for different reasons: sports performance, pain prevention, that finish line photo—but strengthening your midsection is particularly important for runners. That’s because your core is the stabilizing center of your body (it keeps you standing, least of all sprinting), and it can make or break your speed goals, prevent (or contribute to!) an injury, and yes, make you feel pretty badass in a sports bra.

When your career begins at age 11 as the youngest artist to reach #1 on the Billboard charts and continues on through adulthood, it’s almost difficult to believe one could still have professional firsts, but RI native and “The Voice” Alum, Billy Gilman, did just that with his first ever arena concert at the Dunkin Donuts Center.

I had a screaming fit the other day trying to do this. It was 24 or 26AWG wire and the terminal kept jamming in the crimpers. they were the nice ratcheting ones, too. Then I found out I had ordered the complete wrong pins for the connector I was trying to assemble.

“I’m proud that in this phone is almost every black filmmaker that’s actively making films in the last 10, 15 years,” she said, sitting in her trailer on the Wrinkle set in the redwoods, rolling the device around in her palm. “And whether they’re my close homie, like Ryan Coogler, or whether they’re someone that I don’t know that well but I like their films a lot, like Barry Jenkins, they’re there.” (She has industry friends, but they’re mostly creators—not gatekeepers.) Jenkins’ film, Moonlight, won the Academy Award for Best Picture.

All that pressure through your feet can lead to them getting hot on warm days. As well as weight reduction, that’s why some shoes use lightweight mesh to let air in and cool your feet. Many shoes also have ventilation holes in the soles, though these can make you too cold in the winter. A strip of duct tape fixes that.

Somewhere along the line came the discovery that he could string a few words together, followed by the even more remarkable discovery that people were mug enough to pay for this rather than expecting him to do an honest day’s work. He’s pretty certain he’s worked for even more bike publications than Mat Brett.

For as long as ships have plied the world’s oceans, sailors have returned from distant seas with terrifying tales of many armed monsters rising up from the abyss, attacking ships and devouring men. In the "Odyssey" the mythic beast was called "Scylla," in Tennyson’s time, the "Kraken." Generations have been horrified by Jules Vern’s nightmarish creature in "Ten Thousand Leagues under the Sea," the Giant Squid. To modern biology, the world’s largest invertebrate is known as Archituethis–Greek for Ruling Squid. On November 2, 1878, an Atlantic Giant Squid became stranded in shallow water in the harbor at Thimble Tickle, Newfoundland. Three fishermen hooked onto the floundering animal with a grapple hook, which they tied with a line to a tree on shore, and then they waited for the tide to go out. At low tide the writhing creature lay marooned and doomed on the muddy flats. Its huge mantle measured 20 feet from the tip of its fin to its formidable parrot-like beak. One of the squid’s 35 foot-long tentacles was chopped off and weighed in at 734 pounds. When it finally died, the fishermen brought out axes and butchered the gargantuan animal for dog food. In the 1930s the crew of the Royal Norwegian Navy tanker, the "Brunswick" reported that the ship was stalked and attacked several times by giant squids, which wrapped themselves around the ship’s hull. Unable to keep a firm grip on the slippery steel, the squids slid aft into the ship’s propeller. In October 1966, two lighthouse keepers at Danger Point, South Africa observed a giant squid attacking, killing and devouring a baby Southern Right whale as the mother watched helplessly. Dead giant squids measuring seventy-five feet have been recovered from fishing nets hauled up from great depths. These lifeless blobs of collapsed flesh are mere hints of living monsters with sixteen-inch eyes and tentacles big as tree trunks armed with rows of barbed suckers the size of Frisbees. There are eyewitness reports of giant squids approaching 175 feet. There is even a World War II account of shipwrecked sailors being attacked by a squid that plucked one unlucky seaman out of the lifeboat and pulled him screaming beneath the waves. Credible or not, these are "sea stories" told by men home from strange lands and stranger seas—-unbelievable men and men believable but lacking proof. No scientist has ever documented the life of Archituethis–no photographs have ever been taken, no corroborated evidence exists–nothing. So the legend grows. This story, however, is about another kind of squid, which is what sailors are sometimes called. I was on my way up to the bridge to have a look at the aged and habitually malfunctioning radar when a very unusual noise caught my attention. The strange sound emanated from a bizarre apparition roughly a hundred yards off the starboard bow. At first glance it appeared to be an old steamship’s paddlewheel incongruously churning away all by itself in the otherwise placid sea. Then, rising up out of the water, it looked like an enormous angry black fist, snapping its great thumb loudly and repeatedly. And then we saw that another many-fingered hand had wrapped itself tightly around this fist in a wriggling death grip. The two wrestling specters were in fact the legendary sperm whale in mortal combat with that denizen of the deep, the giant squid. The whale breached, twirling as it exploded up into the air. This caused several of the squid’s whip-like tentacles to flail about like the arms of a dancer possessed. With its powerful toothy jaw the sperm whale chomped hungrily at the squid’s tentacles as they crashed together back down into the brine. The squid, snaking its remaining arms around the whale’s massive head, rooted its beak into the mammal’s thick gray hide and tore at the hinge point of its chomping mandible. On deck, ship’s work ceased as everyone rushed to the starboard side and gaped in awe at a spectacle very few humans had witnessed before. But the outcome of this titanic battle was by no means certain, for it was impossible to tell who was eating whom. Did the whale stalk the squid through the black abyss, clamp onto its prey and drag it helplessly up a mile or so into the bright light of day for a cruel feast, or was it perhaps the squid that had attacked the unsuspecting whale? The eye of the squid bore, in its grim implacability, a look of cool determination, while it was the whale that seemed to be the one creating all the ruckus. Which creature was playing with its catch and which one was fighting for its life we would never know, for it was the Captain’s prerogative to stop the ship or not, and no one questioned it, nor did anyone consider for even one second suggesting to the old man that this was perhaps something worth looking at, or at least slowing down the old rust bucket for, you know, one precious minute, just for the hell of it. Think maybe we could break the mind-numbing monotony of another boring workday at sea just for a few lousy minutes? No sir. The unnecessary stopping of a United States Naval vessel, if only for a rare moment like this one, was completely out of the question; the need to stay the course, to stick to business, was paramount. That was the Navy way. The splashing and snapping sounds faded as the fight raged on. Then finally it passed out of our sight altogether as the ship steamed along its determined way, and before long we too were out of the sight of that huge unblinking eye. Ship’s work continued. Deck seamen went back to chipping away at the perpetually rusting haze gray paint. Down below, Enginemen toiled uninterrupted in the insufferable heat. Amidships, in the galley, sweat-drenched mess cooks prepared another predictable meal for the crew. Up in the breeze on the starboard wing of the bridge, the captain lighted his sweet-smelling pipe and casually observed the passing wonder. I scrambled up the ladders to the bridge to fix the temperamental radar while the ship and its men proceeded undistracted over the great blue highway, oblivious to the outside world except for its effect on the movement of the ship. The ocean-going tug, “USS Quapaw” was our home, our work place and our prison. Chapter Two It was 1965, the year Vietnam really started to heat up. On the Fourth of July, a month after high school graduation, the five-year exile from my beloved mother came to an abrupt end when a little chunk of plaque lodged itself in the left coronary artery of her fragile heart and killed her at the desperate age of forty. I had lost my bearing with little grasp of what lay ahead, or to which direction I should turn in the coming months, consequently, my first unwary step out of childhood was smack into deep shit. I got drafted. There is a perilous and brief period in a young man’s life when he is suitable and useful for military induction. At age eighteen he is nearly full grown, but still very much a boy, not yet cognizant in most cases of his own individuality and self- worth. Still bound by the shackles of authority, he is, if normally brought up, the malleable product of a culture that claims to value certain qualities in its young males: obedience, selflessness, and unflinching loyalty. His parents, his football coach, and his scout leader strive to instill such virtues in the boy so that by the time he reaches the age of eighteen he should be willing to "jump" when told to do so, and ask "how high?" on the way up. In boot camp those are the first words out of a drill instructor’s mouth right after he’s barked that other famously obnoxious dictum. "I’m your mother. I’m your father. I’m your coach. I’m your preacher. I’m God and your ass is mine." By the age of around twenty-five the average young man will have developed a degree of self-respect and possibly a mind of his own and will likely reply, “My ass is mine, sir. You may kiss it if you like." Most men, by that age, will have slipped beyond the reach of questionable authority. In our little town, the largely working-class families reared children much as their parents had, in the traditional American way. When duty called, a young man was expected to answer, or have a good reason not to, or at the very least, a believable and acceptable excuse not to. While college deferments and sympathetic family doctors were available to some the day Uncle Sam came to town, the rest found themselves caught out in the open without any means of escape. Many ambivalent young men simply resigned themselves to the war and accepted their fates as plain dumb luck. Others, who felt the patriotic urge, assumed the responsibility of serving their country, stood up and volunteered. Still, many others, out of mortal fear or moral outrage, simply refused to go and thus began a movement. A ripe and ready crop of “baby boomers” was just coming of age when the war began, like Vietnam was merely a natural Darwinian response to a burgeoning population of young males, the next wave of lemmings, like our fathers had been to the World War I generation and the Gulf War boys were to our own. Conceived in the valiant spirit of victory, our generation was born into the crucible of a post war America saturated in the stuff of combat and, sensing it in the womb, we came out sniffing the air for gun smoke. We grew up captivated by our father’s endless references to “The War”, to its heroics, its machinery, and its misery. "Bombs over Tokyo, here I come!" Instinctively we knew how to hold off the enemy with our Mattel "burp-guns," bravely going out in a blaze of glory. And boy did we know how to die; that was crucial. You didn’t just fall down dead; no, you imploded into the fatal bullet like they always did in the movies, then clasping your hands over the mortal wound to retain the last glimmer of life, you died standing your ground and then slowly and dramatically fell into the grass, being careful not to put your hand down to break the fall–it being nobler to get a bruise than spoil the effect. Our earnest boyhood dream was to someday become real war heroes just like our dads had been. We expected it. Maybe we even wanted it. Then one day we lost interest in the childish games. We put away our cap guns, boxed-up the tin soldiers and model airplanes, said goodbye to catching frogs, flying moon-faced kites on windy days and riding clunky old bicycles down dusty country roads. Something big and wonderful was blowing in the wind and it spoke of the entire meaning and mystery of life and we followed it out of town like the pied piper. Tuning-in the "Tambourine Man” on our car radios we set out to look for the one thing that could fill our hungry hearts–girls. Girls were better than all that kid stuff combined. Better by far than the best day ever at the swimming hole–ten times more fun than Christmas. No ball game no matter how fantastic the win nor what the score, nothing heretofore conceivable exceeded the thrill of the chase, the exciting hit to first, then to second, on to third base, and a final ecstatic slide into home plate. Not so fast boys. There was an ominous knock at the front door. "Remember me?" He had been a familiar presence, skulking in the shadows of the vacant lot where we had once played our war games, and then he had disappeared. He returned now, years later, to claim that we’d made some kind of unspoken pact with him. It was pay up time. How could it be? We were just little boys goofing around in a make believe world, having some innocent fun with our toys. “But a deal,” he said “is a deal,” and now our parents could not protect us, for we were no longer children. The Selective Service hung over our heads like the sword of Damocles. Upon turning draft age, all young men had a crucial decision to make. Trouble was most of us had never made a decision more important than whether or not we would try out for the high-school football team (Coincidentally our high school football team was named the Toledo “Boomers,” after a large rat-like rodent called the mountain boomer) or whom we would ask to the senior prom. Considering myself somewhat outside of the social scene and woefully too thin and clumsy to be of any use on the football field, I chose not to participate in either of those two teenage exercises in awkwardness, and judging from an old high school annual photograph of the turnout at my class prom, I was not alone on the outside. Convinced that I was really not the kind of guy who fit the profile of the typical red-blooded American warrior, I fully expected the higher powers to recognize that fact when my name came up. "Don’t bother”, I assumed they would say, “We’re not going to get much out of that one." And that was just fine with me. On turning eighteen every Oregon boy was required to report to the Armed Forces Entrance Examining Station (AFEES) in Portland for a battery of tests to determine his fitness for military service. Some general intelligence tests eliminated the mentally incompetent. I believe we were also tested for certain disqualifying socio-pathologies, psychoses, neuroses and other mal-adjustments, but perhaps not, judging from the variety of mental misfits often encountered in the military. Like cattle gone to auction, we were herded from one inspection to another and our bodies were thoroughly examined from every aspect, front to back and top to bottom. They checked our hearts, lungs, livers, kidneys, eyes, ears, noses, throats, teeth, skulls, hair, skin, spines, arms, hands, fingernails, legs, knees, feet, toenails, penises, testicles and assholes. For an inspection of our assholes a group of a hundred or so were led into an auditorium and ordered to form a big circle. “Turn your backs to the center of the room and strip down.” Earlier they had threatened immediate induction into the army infantry for any troublemakers. That wasn’t true of course, but what did we know? We couldn’t be certain of anything. This was all new and intimidating stuff and no one felt like challenging the authority of the United States military so we obediently did what we were told and removed our clothes and piled them at our feet. “Now bend over, spread your cheeks, and keep your mouths shut." While we held that position a rather abrupt and somewhat surly doctor strode along with a clipboard and a special flashlight which he used for illuminating each man’s hole. He stopped now and then to make notations on particular anuses; a few of them required closer scrutiny and some discussion with colleagues. Meanwhile the lot of us, trying not to make eye contact with those across the room, gazed blankly at the view between our legs of the very peculiar spectacle of a long upside-down row of a wide variety of butt holes and eyebrows. At each step of the physical I found myself, not only expecting, but actually hoping to be found blessed with a defect of one sort or another; the army, in its quest for good soldiers, wanted to draft only perfect assholes and I really didn’t want to be one of them. We were still civilians at this point, with Constitutional Rights and all that, just like everyone else. So we thought. The examiners had not yet devised a way to make the hearing test another opportunity for humiliation so it was administered privately in a small room with one’s clothes on. The technician placed a set of headphones on me and then, with some knurled knobs, he adjusted the dials on the test equipment. “When you hear a sound in your left ear, push this button,” he said. “When the sound is in you right ear, push that one.” Simple enough I agreed and he left the room to smoke a cigarette in the hallway with some colleagues. At first the tones were faint and indistinguishable from the ringing left in my ears after the last time my brother and I went deer hunting together. That got me all screwed up right off the bat. Soon there were loud whistles, foghorns, and sirens blaring left and right so loudly that I could hear them in both ears simultaneously, and they were coming faster than I could keep up with them and getting me so confused that, in utter frustration, I ripped the headphones off and slammed them down on the table. At that very moment the examiner re-entered the room. “What the hell are you doing? Idiots! You’re all idiots. I told you to leave those goddamned headphones on until I got back. What’re you fucking DEAF?” “No,” I tried to explain, while at the same time realizing that I had unwittingly let a possible medical deferment slip right through my fingers. The examiner furiously scribbled in his portion of my check-off list and then with the butt of his cigarette pointed me toward the door and motioned the next idiot in. Worrying as much as I was about the draft could have given anyone a case of ulcers—indeed the very ulcers that just might have provided me with a much-coveted medical deferment. So now I had one more thing to worry about: how to get the bleeding ulcers I desperately needed. Hoping and praying to somehow fail to meet the physical requirements, I even thought that my abnormal skinniness might at last be of some benefit and deem me unfit for military service. Assuming that any number of things could be wrong with me, and still considering myself to be somewhat lucky, as my stepmother had often proclaimed, I found it nearly impossible to picture myself wearing any kind of military uniform, let alone fighting in the jungles of a distant country somewhere near Siam, a mysterious country that had not even been mentioned in my high school geography class, at least that I could remember from one of the possible rare moments that I was awake at my desk. So to hedge my bet if luck suddenly ran out on me, I had applied to and had been accepted at an easy-to-get-into nearby junior college. The war would be won without my help as everyone was sure it would be, just like the last war, or rather the one before the last one, which was Korea, which was conveniently forgotten by the year 1965. But I wasn’t quite ready to register for classes—figured I still had some time to enjoy my first year out of high school. Wasn’t that worried—yet. College was the smartest choice of a limited number of options available to determined draft dodgers. A felony drug conviction for the possession of a minute amount of marijuana would disqualify any otherwise-upstanding young man. Conveniently bad knees discovered by a concerned family doctor after four years of doctor approved high school football kept a lot of healthy boys out of harm’s way. Walking into your local draft board office with another guy’s penis in your hand would automatically win two young men instant 4F status. Before “Don’t ask don’t tell” it was “No homos need apply.” This might be a hard thing to live down in a small town, but one could have claimed to be a bed-wetter.4F for sure on that one. Better to bite the bullet though and risk getting killed in a pointless war and kill a few “Gooks” while you’re at it than to try to live that one down. “Now why was it you didn’t have to go to war Daddy?” The young Bill Clinton followed his conscience and opposed the war. He was smart. Another young man, who would one day earn a place in the history books for shoving Bill Clinton’s dick in America’s face, was spared from proving himself on the battlefield by the “heartbreak of psoriasis.” An acquaintance of mine used a little household detergent to exacerbate his psoriasis, which was common practice in those days. Hey, who wouldn’t do it? I’ll bet the prosecutor did it. Could have. I began to envy those with minor afflictions. Vice president Dick Cheney got four questionable college deferments and one for a dependent child so as to better serve his country by spying on campus anti-war activists for the U.S. government. They were the "real" draft dodgers in his opinion. He was an enthusiastic supporter of the war in Vietnam, as much as he is for recent and future wars, but he had important plans for his life, stating recently that, ”I had other priorities in the Sixties than military service.” Risking his own neck in Vietnam was definitely not one of his “priorities.” What with all the causes he finds worth dying for I am amazed that the man is still alive. Oh right, they were causes worth OTHERS dying for. Future president George W. Bush appears to have been totally unaffected by the war in Vietnam–claims he never even discussed it in college. He had of course heard about it though, because there is evidence that he wasn’t so eager to go there when the opportunity arose. At the time, the Texas Air National Guard flight training school had a waiting list of a year and a half, yet despite after having surpassed all expectations by “somehow” achieving the lowest possible qualifying score on the pilot aptitude test, George Junior was shoved to the front of a long waiting-line and admitted the day he applied–just twelve days before the expiration of his college deferment. As one of a privileged class of National Guard “Champagne” fighter pilots he was exempted from and he did not volunteer for overseas service. When the Guard began testing its “weekend warrior” pilots for cocaine use George Junior decided it was high time he quit flying altogether, and from many news reports, his superiors at the time have no recollection of him attending any Guard meetings at all after that; why he wasn’t charged with going AWOL remains a mystery. From here on it was party-time for the devil-may-care young man who preferred barstool pacifism to fighting. “Dubya” didn’t stand up for peace exactly and probably would have fallen flat on his fortunate face if he had tried, but like many young men at the time he felt that the war was an evil to be avoided. And who can hold that against the man? The high life continued for many years until the day George Herbert Walker Bush introduced his fun-loving son to the evangelical minister Billy Graham. And so it was on the road to Washington that George Jr.’s miraculous conversion took place. The peace-loving Ivy Leaguer of mediocre intellect finds Jesus Christ and soon thereafter becomes the “war-mongering ignoramus” and then suddenly discovers a powerful urge to kick some foreign butt. The Bush administration is rife with bellicose, saber rattling, draft dodgers driving the nation and it’s young to do that which they themselves had once lacked the stomach. And then there were boys like my little brother whose application for Conscientious Objector status was based solely on his objection to killing people. The draft review board required more than that; a religious affiliation of some kind was necessary to make his claim "official." But he couldn’t provide one, because, like me, he was a “heathen” (as our father had often said). In fact he even refused the convenient one with which they’d offered to furnish him to "validate his claim." This after first informing him that his was the longest and most sincere hearing to date. The military is an organization that exists for the purpose of institutionalized killing, so it was no big surprise to him when they rejected his claim. He simply decided to go underground–with his conscience intact. As it turned out, my hearing like everything else was deemed to be in perfect working order. Maybe I was as skinny as a pool cue but I was nevertheless found to be in excellent physical condition. ”The Army’ll put some meat on your bones kid.” Meat. And that is exactly what it felt like to be issued a draft card stamped 1-A in the year 1965-meat. I would make a fine soldier. Draft cards were to be carried at all times under penalty of imprisonment, stiff fines, or immediate induction. Police often pulled us over simply to see if we were carrying the despised card. If you were draft age and caught without your card you were in trouble. Though it was still too early in the war to be thinking about Canada, especially for us backward thinking small-town boys, it was an idea that would appeal to me a few years later. For now a college deferment was my only way out. Having no comprehension of what was happening in Vietnam, I was politically ambivalent about the war; basically I felt, “Why get involved?” It’s not that I thought there was nothing worth fighting for–far from it. I’ve always had the utmost respect for my father’s generation and for anyone else who has ever fought the good fight. To be willing to die for what you believe in your heart to be just is noble in my book. They are always the ones with the most to lose who join that fight; there is real honor in that. It is the dubious wars that the boys are forced to fight without any real choice in the matter. There is very little honor in killing or in dying in an ignoble war and that is how Vietnam was shaping up in the year 1965. “Forward the Light Brigade!” Was there a man dismay’d? Not Tho’ the soldier knew Someone had blunder’d: Their’s not to make reply, Their’s not to reason why, Their’s but to do and die: Into the valley of Death Rode the six hundred Tennyson A growing number of us Lincoln County boys began paying frequent visits to a woman named Helen Wade who ran the local draft-board office over in nearby Newport. Hell, Helen WAS the local draft board office. She filed our names by birth date in a locked cabinet behind her desk, and regularly got a fresh list from Uncle Sam to pull and process. Since she held the keys to our fates it seemed only prudent to get friendly with her, which was tricky business, probably even counterproductive, given her growing weariness of the steady stream of anxious young men poking their heads through the office door and sucking-up to her like she could be gotten with a few pleasantries and a friendly smile. Besides, the nature of her work required a certain detachment. To regard boys being sent off to an unjust war as faceless numbers was a lot easier on the conscience than thinking of them as actual human beings. Still, despite her seemingly impartial earnestness, we thought perhaps she could arrange something–at the very least give us a heads-up, a wink or a nod for Christ’s sake. She was our last chance, short of burning the place down, which was a plan, often but not seriously deliberated, after some under-age drinking, as one way to save our draft-age butts. Our contempt for the selective service and growing distaste for a war that had already taken a number of our friends had not yet turned us boys into criminals. After one such visit to Helen’s office, I left, comforted by the delusion that I was in no immediate danger of getting my notice, and foolishly I succumbed to a sudden streak of youthful recklessness. I decided to risk waiting until the following term to go to college. I didn’t really want to go to that stupid podunk junior college anyway. I too had a life to live, with, ”other priorities than military service,” not the least of which was a budding romance with a certain nubile young lady, well, girl. And besides I didn’t really appreciate being dictated to by the Federal Government. Those inept bureaucrats and corrupt politicians didn’t own me, so screw’em. The official invitation appeared, ineluctably, soon thereafter, in the rather large mailbox at the end of our long gravel driveway. Belying its ominous content, the “draft notice” had an upbeat tone to it. "Greetings from the President of the United States," it cheerfully proclaimed, as if I had been selected to participate, not in the latest holocaust, but on the panel of judges at the "Miss America" beauty pageant. I almost threw up when I read it. Wondering if there hadn’t been some kind of bumbling clerical error made over at Helen Wade’s office, I jumped into my little black MGA roadster and sped over to Newport to find out what the goddamned fucking hell had happened. What Helen (and certainly I too) had not foreseen, soon became news that would rip America apart; President Lyndon Baines Johnson had opened the floodgates on Vietnam. The next day, as I passed through the dining room of our house, my stepmother and the mother of "the girl next door" played with a Ouija board at the dining table. It was as strange then as it would be today, but not that unusual for those two post-war moms. Hoovermatics and Maytags had liberated Donna and Betty from much of the endless drudgery their own mothers had long endured. They were just passing the time until the kids and the husbands came home from the schools and the mills. Sometimes they played scrabble. Other times they busied themselves with a jigsaw puzzle or cribbage. Their conversation generally turned to gossip, a lot of it concerning their difficult stepchildren, or the evil X’s. They always met after a telephone call for percolated coffee at the house of the recent news; this time it was our house. "Is Charlie going to Vietnam?" Donna and Betty casually steered the planchette toward my destiny. "YES," the Ouija board predicted. “Oh my!” "Is Charlie coming back from Vietnam?" The Planchette zoomed across the board to an emphatic "NO." Donna and Betty stared bleakly at me as I shook my head in disbelief and slouched off to my bedroom mumbling under my breath. “Oh for Christ’s sake, just go fold clothes or something, would you?” And that, dear reader, is precisely what I myself would be learning to do real soon—and far better than I ever would have imagined. After receiving his notice the draftee had two weeks in order to find an alternative service to the dreaded two-year Army hitch, which was an almost certain trip to Vietnam as a rifle toting infantryman. Business was brisk with the various recruiters who were easily filling quotas with frantic hordes of young men looking everywhere for a way out. Positions in the more desirable services like the Coast Guard and reserve programs were disappearing faster than free "Grateful Dead" tickets. I was now obliged to do business with the military service, in other words-to make a pact with the devil, and ultimately decided, in resignation, that it was time to pay a visit to the United States Navy recruiter. So one morning I boldly walked into the navy recruiting office over in Newport, confident that I was about to make the man’s day and proceeded to offer him the exclusive services of one of the finest specimens of grade 1-A inspected American male on the market. I would, I told him, be that podunk College’s loss and his gain. What the heck, a couple years of travel, some life experience. Couldn’t be that bad now could it? Maybe I would get a sailboat someday-always wanted one; a little experience at sea just might come in handy. I was almost ready to sign-up, but first I had to see what my options were and all of the benefits I was entitled to. I was going to get everything I had coming. It was time to deal the cards. I sat right down in the chair in front of his desk, leaned forward and said, “I want to see the world.” Like a street hustler at the top of his trade the recruiter went right to work and played me like a mark in a game of Three Card Monte. "We got nothin’ open right now son. Why don’t you come back tomorrow?" I returned first thing the next morning having lost much of the previous day’s confidence to a sleepless night. "All we got’s four years active," he said. I said, “To hell with that.” "What about the two year reserve program?" I asked, trying to sound somewhat informed and merely curious, but he must have detected a slight urgency in the rising tone of my voice. Damned right he did. Guys like me were coming into his office all the time. He knew the score. I didn’t want to plead, but hell, couldn’t he just make some phone calls or something? I started to sweat. "Those are all finished pal." "Two year active, four year reserve?" Now I was down on my knees begging for something I really didn’t want anyway. "You missed the boat on that one too." This went on for several dreadful days. At one point I half-seriously considered joining the Marines; what the hell, they’d at least make a real man out of me. Guaranteed… The Few the Proud. When I told my Dad I was thinking about joining the United States Marines Corps he got a troubling look on his face. It was a combination of dismay and disgust, like he was staring at the word "MORON" smeared across my forehead in blood-red lipstick. He had been a Navy man-in THE war. "You’re too smart for that Charlie." Wow! Smart? Did he actually say that? After eighteen years of telling me that everything I touched turned to shit right in my hands, my Dad gives me a gentle pat on the back and it wasn’t to shove me off the brink either–well not into certain death anyway. Frankly I was feeling pretty damned stupid and needed some sensible fatherly advice and for once in my life I took it. With the now familiar look of panic in my eyes I paid yet another distressing visit to the Navy recruiter. When I walked in, he was sitting comfortably behind his desk drinking his morning cup of coffee. A chair was positioned in front of his desk like an electric-chair waiting for a condemned man. “Have a seat,” said the recruiter in his usual businesslike manner. Nervously, I sat down in the chair as the relaxed uniformed man leaned back behind his desk and casually juggled my life in his two clever hands. At this point I was practically screaming at him. "Please! Don’t you have anything?" The three-year active duty program was beginning to look inevitable, desirable even; what the hell, one extra year of tolerable service to avoid ending up slogging through the malarial, booby-trapped rice paddies of Southeast Asia trying to dodge Viet Cong bullets? A year at sea in exchange for perhaps the rest of my life seemed acceptable. Not a bad trade I reasoned. The terrors of the Mekong delta were almost palpable as I suddenly found myself pleading for that at which on the previous day I had scoffed. “What the hell,” I said, like I had just cut the deal of my life, “I’ll take it. Give me the three year active-duty program.” "Sorry son, that was yesterday. There’s nothing I can do for you today. Should have jumped on it sooner; maybe I could have done something for you. Not now. Looks like you’ll be going to war." He may as well have said, "Sorry son if you’ll just step into that room over there, a live hand grenade will be shoved up your ass. Good luck and good day." "So this is how my carefree life ends,” I thought to myself, “so quickly and so pointlessly." It probably looked to the recruiter like I was getting ready to really freak out–which was precisely the case. I could almost hear the bullet coming that was going to blow my brains out. My head was already exploding. Mister Navy Recruiter Sir was now ready for the sting. "Heck I’m just teasin’ ya, son," he says, as he flips a sheet of paper that had been lying there in front of him the whole time, discreetly face down, and slides it across his desk. "Just sign there." Now, never was a document more swiftly signed than the one transferring title of ownership of one Charles L. Rasmussen from Charles L. Rasmussen to the United States Government, Department of the Navy. I happily signed up for a four-year active-duty hitch in the regular Navy, believing at that moment that it was better than getting my sorry ass blown off. Well, it was done. They got me. However, by spring of 1966 the U.S. Navy was so crammed full of reluctant enlistees like myself that it had begun stacking them up for a four-month waiting period just to get into boot camp; it was called the “Cache Program,” and that suited me just fine. I was in no hurry whatsoever for an abrupt end to my freedom. At the outset, four months seemed like an eternity; hell anything could happen in that amount of time. The way I figured it, this unnecessary war would soon be over anyway and I’d get another letter before long saying "never mind" and then I could simply resume my life as it had been before. The other way I figured it was that the United States of America would nuke Hanoi, as some politicians had already urged, and that would set off the Third World War. The next day Soviet thermo-nuclear torpedoes would vaporize the entire U.S. fleet and that would be that. With no more ships, and probably civilization to boot, there would hardly be a need for sailors. The only thing I was dead certain about was that I was in love for the first time in my life. Chapter Three "Help, I need somebody. Not just anybody." Christine was a girl I’d had my eye on for quite some time, at close range. She had been dating my best friend for over a year. Larry and I had spent a lot of time together those first delirious months out of high school, double dating and just goofing around. We were buddies. To earn college money, we both took summer jobs at the local paper-mill and started the same shift with keg-party hangovers the day after high school graduation. We worked hard at our entry-level jobs, and we played even harder, often skipping sleep after a graveyard shift only to face another grueling eight-hour shift following sixteen hours on the go. Booze, fast cars and girls supplied the main ingredients to our fun. Neither of us was too keen on starting school in the fall and frankly the only reason we felt obliged to was to beat the draft. So we stayed on at the paper mill that fall and partied on into winter, all the while keeping one precarious step ahead of Uncle Sam. Christine was with Larry more often than not and after while I grew accustomed to having her around. As far as I was concerned she was the prettiest girl in town and the first one I could never see enough of. Beguiling, quick and adventurous, her easy spirit was as welcome to me as a sunny spring day on the otherwise cloudy Oregon coast. I had had a couple of girlfriends already, nothing serious, although I almost had to marry one of them at the muzzle-end of her dad’s .306 hunting rifle, which might not have been all that bad–she was sure pretty enough, if not just a tad too wild. But Christine was the one for me. She was the one–THE ONE. As it happened in our small constellation, the gravitational center between the three of us shifted eventually toward her and me. (In an old love letter from me to her there is mention of a foretelling birthday kiss suspiciously eyed by our respective dates). After Larry went away to college (that same stupid Podunk junior college–one sensible step ahead of me) it was by awkward avoidance that I didn’t see Christine for a while. Then I began to feel an inescapable longing for a closeness that I had grown accustomed to–along with an over-ridden pang of guilt. There had never been any conscious intentions between Christine and me and for that to happen would have been a statement of some magnitude, and that, in the overwhelming crush of desire, was absolutely inevitable. The day finally came when we saw each other again and our feelings became as obvious to us as they had been to Larry. It was no big surprise then to him when he came home a few months later and found that everything had changed, but not our friendship we promised each other. But naturally it had. So I quit my menial job at the paper mill and lived off the money I’d saved for college, whiling away my final weeks of freedom like a rich man on a splurge, living for today, hoping tomorrow would never come. Christine and I clung hard to each other and to our faith in enduring love, as if love was something that could be squirreled away like acorns for the long months and years ahead; it had to last. I visualized the two of us standing on the face of an enormous clock with days instead of numbers marking the precious time being swept away by a relentless hand turning steadily and swiftly toward my day of departure. Each and every afternoon I picked up Christine after school and we drove off to spend the remainder of the day together, which invariably included some quality smooch time at one of our favorite parking spots—two American kids growing up fast as we could. Regardless of my predicament, I was happy to be alive and thrilled to be with Christine, even at the expense of my freedom. I never regretted it; she was all I cared about. From that point on, it was us against the world. Christine’s dad, Harry, owned a Rexall drug store on Main Street. He was also the mayor of "Sweet little Toledo." A small sign at the city limits decreed, "Entering Toledo, Oregon, Population 3,250 Drive Carefully." It still announced the same number decades later until wild blackberry vines finally pulled the faded board down into the bushes. No one cared anymore. A half-dozen miles or so from the Pacific Ocean, Toledo nestles snugly into the forested hillsides of an isolated valley in the Oregon Coast Range. It seems larger than it is, owing to the number of angles from which it can be viewed. Laid flat on open ground one might quite easily drive through the whole of it in under a minute. The town proper is a maze of roller-coaster streets, namesakes of the trees that gave birth and sustenance to the busy little community: Alder Way, Beech Street, Cedar, Douglas. It’s the kind of place you must become familiar with before you can find your way around, or your way out. It rains much of the time there, except for a few dreamy weeks of late summer and early fall. According to records, the heaviest annual rainfall in North America almost continually soaks the even smaller village of neighboring Valsetz, which earns the distinction over Toledo only because they bother to measure it. In the summer of 1970 Toledo was the location site for the movie made from "Sometimes a Great Notion," Ken Keasey’s grim novel about a ruggedly individualistic Oregon logging family; it was a logging town. From the latter part of the nineteenth century through the middle of the twentieth, the industrious Toledo grew in inverse proportion to the dwindling ancient forests. For decades a seemingly endless supply of timber flowed down the many treacherous logging roads that had been cut fatally deep into the magnificent forests. Like great wooden corpuscles they flowed into the heart of town, hauled there by the millions on the backs of roaring, rumbling, Peterbuilt, REO, and Mack log-trucks. On the river, a sturdy breed of men who wore aluminum hardhats to church, rolled their cigarettes with one hand and with the other they deftly steered the small but stout workhorse “bumper” tugboats through the cold bone-numbing drizzle, towing long ponderous log rafts down the brackish slow-moving Yaquina as it looped through Toledo on its meandering journey to the Pacific. The rhythm of the woods and the sawmills pulsed through town with the persistence of the sun and the moon and the tides. Steam whistles echoing back and forth across the narrow valley marked the shift changes as the mills gobbled up the trees at a staggering rate, ‘round the clock, for a hundred years. It was dangerous work turning forests into lumber, there being as many ways to maim or kill a lumberjack as there were trees in the woods or machines in the sawmills. "Widow-makers" lurked somewhere high up in the branches every tree. In the clamorous sawmills there were a thousand ways to lose a hand, or an eye, or a life. But there was also the reassuring comfort of nature’s life-sustaining bounty in that cozy valley. Humid coastal air perfumed with the pitchy fragrance of fresh-cut Douglas fir, cedar and spruce blended sweetly with the clouds of wood smoke welling up from the sawmill’s wigwam scrap burners and the rank aroma of the river’s intertidal mud-flats. At night the wigwam burners glowed like ghostly orange teepees through a thick damp blanket of fog. That same dense fog intensified the many distinct sounds of the mills: the steady whine of the saws, a sharp hiss of steam, the metallic clank of machinery and clatter of chains, a thudding tumble of logs, and carried it all up through the empty winding streets of Toledo. Like gentle music it lulled the townsfolk to sleep. By the time the sixties rolled around, the bounty of the primeval forests, which had once seemed limitless, was being cut a second time and replanted yet once again, transforming the great Coast Range into vast tracts of uniformity–tree farms. Eventually only a few scattered stands of the ancient woods remained under tenuous protection from the ravenous chainsaws. Gone were the hay-days of the legendary virgin forests, of logging trucks parading down Toledo’s Main Street bearing the lifeless remains of a fallen giant. Nature had been tamed, and so too the people. All that remained for the loggers were spindly trees, useful only to the new paper mill, which processed them into pulp for paper bags and cardboard boxes and to the last plywood mill that peeled the slender logs down to the core and pressed the knot-holed skins into uniform sheets. The heady aromas of better times blew away in the wind, and were replaced by the acrid stench of sulfur and the sour odor of cooked cabbage, a stink that earned the revitalized town its new nickname, "Toilet Hole." Rows of cookie-cutter houses hurriedly built for employees of the new paper-mill soon sprang-up in the shadow of its towering smokestack. Now the residents of modern neighborhoods wishfully named Cedar View and Fir Crest looked out upon the endless clear-cut tracts and bragged of the tallest smokestack in the Northwest, referring to its putrid toxic vapors as the "smell of bread and butter." When my mom kicked my dad out, he left for good the small town of Washougal, Washington where he and my mother had grown up, and moved to Toledo where he took a job as a journeyman electrician at the new Georgia Pacific pulp and paper mill. It was an impulsive move that happily settled him there for the rest of his life. Early one cold rainy morning, shortly after the end of a graveyard shift, my father sat bleary-eyed at the breakfast counter of the Sunnyside café and furtively glanced over the rim of his coffee cup toward the shapely behind of the 26-year-old waitress. He had seen her before with a guitar at one of the taverns, twanging away at a Johnny Cash tune for the hard working, hard drinking hard-hats. When she swung around and slid a tall stack of buttermilk pancakes with bacon and eggs over easy across the counter, my hungry dad looked up and gazed fatefully into the pale green eyes of a fiery natural redheaded divorcee named Donna Lee (the same name that would one day adorn the transom of his fishing boat). She was looking for a good working man for herself and her two little girls. Bingo! A year later my little brother Ivan and I ended up there in exile as well; our mom had been losing control of us and wearily gave up the battle. Even though I’d always gotten along with my dad about as well as Mom did, at the pivotal age twelve I was ready to cut loose her apron strings and follow the man whom she’d always regarded as the link between Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon. She viewed herself as others did–supremely modern–one of the first women in America wanting to find herself. My mother was born thirty years too soon. She looked good in a fifties housedress as she hung billowing sheets and pillowcases on the backyard clothesline to flutter dry in the afternoon breeze. Looking good came natural to her–being a housewife didn’t. And she wasn’t the kind of mom to bring cupcakes to school on her kid’s birthday either, but one day she did stop by my fourth-grade classroom to drop off something that I’d forgotten at home. I beamed. The boy sitting next to me said at recess that she looked like Loretta Young. “My Mom’s prettier,” I said. She was an artist who could draw like Raphael and everyone who knew her understood that she dreamed of a different life—a better one. She knew her way around men too, and they longed to possess her, flocking to her side, one by one, even little boys, but none more than my brother and me. On the day my brother and I left for Toledo I stood on a stool that made me a little bit taller than my mother and we held each other for a long time. She put her head on my shoulder and said to me, “Now Charlie, you know what it feels like to be a man.” Then off we went for the summer, to be with our dad and to get acquainted with his new family. After supper one evening our dad wanted to talk to Ivan and me; by this time it was nearing the end of August and getting close to the next school year. I was entering the eighth grade while my brother trailed a year behind me. It had been a fun summer, but now we were itching to get back to Washougal, to be with our mom, our sister, our grandparents, and our friends. Big Ivan stood in front of my brother and me as we sat nervously next to each other on the plank steps of the front porch of the small bungalow situated close to the road halfway up the hill on Beech Street. He was a tall man and at that moment he looked like a giant to his worried sons. Giving orders was his usual manner with us, except when we were doing something fun like trying to catch fish or shooting guns at tin cans or some unfortunate animal–then we were his little buddies. The rest of the time we were his personal fetchers and pains-in-the-ass, always at his "God-damned-son-of-a-bitchin’" side, ready to lend an inadequate hand or run for a tool. "Does that look like a box-end wrench to you Charlie? Now go get me a god damned box-end wrench." He talked AT us, dismissing most queries with "What do you want to know for?" or, “How the hell would I know?" Now he wanted to TALK to us. My brother and I sensed the gravity of the moment in the unfamiliar way our dad looked at us. "I know all about what you boys have been up to in Washougal," he said. He was referring to the shoplifting of candy-bars, marbles, BBs and such, the vandalizing of an abandoned house, the smoking of cigarettes snitched from Mom, fistfights in vacant lots and other after-school shenanigans. Tears began to stream down my little brother’s cheeks, not because he was afraid of punishment, and also not because he was as guilty as I was, but because that unfamiliar look in his father’s eyes was one of genuine concern and understanding and it felt strange, scary even, like the end of the world, and in a way for us, it was. And a beginning. I surreptitiously eased my bony elbow into my little brother’s ribs with a "Don’t blow it now" nudge, as I tried my damnedest to appear perplexed and innocent. "You boys don’t HAVE to do that kind of stuff anymore." Have too? I wondered what the hell he meant by that, at the same time knowing full well what it meant to my little brother and me. An absolute miracle had occurred that evening. Our Dad, for the moment at least, had transformed himself into the veritable embodiment of that wise and caring TV father, Ward Cleaver. And we didn’t like it either. But we had no choice. Thus began a new life with a new stepmother, two new stepsisters, a new school, a new blue tick hound, and construction began on a house by a lake in the boonies. We called it “The Place” and our dad built most of it all by himself. Donna lee helped as much as she could and so did “us boys” whenever they could get us to come out of the woods. I have two old black and white photographs. Our Mother took both pictures about a year apart. In the first one, two surly pre-teen boys slump on their grandmother’s couch–the older one sporting a greasy “Kookie, Kookie lend me your comb," Brylecreamed ducktail. Next to me my little brother had so much Lucky Tiger butch wax smeared in his hair that it could stand up to a plunge into the Washougal River. The second photograph taken in a motel overlooking the beach after living with our Dad and Donna Lee for a while shows us leaning into the camera with neatly trimmed hair and big smiles. We had narrowly missed becoming juvenile delinquents. We were also extremely happy to see our mother again. Mom spent the next five years ensconced high upon a pedestal (well she died up there actually). Donna Lee immediately began chipping away at the pedestal’s foundation. Dad fired rounds at it with his .300 Savage hunting rifle, blasting away big chunks of marble. My brother and I busied ourselves with repairs. Our older sister Anita, who remained with Mom, ducked behind the pedestal and dodged the ricocheting bullets. Now it was Donna Lee who ran the show and she was not exactly June Cleaver, but then I was not exactly the easy-going Wally either. My little brother however would have made a fine Beaver. Christine’s family had been Toledo pioneers. By comparison to the wreckage of my family, hers seemed somewhat conventional; her mother Jane could have stood-in for any of the TV mothers. She was a peach, a real peach, and the first woman I could just sit down and talk with. The serene Jane was the natural counterpoint to the entertaining, eccentric, and often coarse Harry who frequently made Sloppy Joes or spaghetti for breakfast in his underwear for any and all who happened by. Sometimes he ran out to the middle of the backyard and cut loose a fart that could be heard by the all neighbors. Said he was “just being considerate.” “Oh Harry,” Jane moaned in mock disgust, as the kids snickered around the breakfast table, which was the whole purpose of the fart. I eased into the Hawkins family like a stray tomcat to the neighborhood cat lady. Christine’s two sisters called me “Chuckerella” given the stepmother and two stepsisters. In my final days of civilian life I was invited to stay in the upstairs bedroom recently vacated by the only son. He had dropped out of high school and joined the Navy himself, but unlike me, not under duress-just thought it would be more interesting than Toledo High School. That turned out to be true all right. His abandoned sanctum sanctorum was filled with a small library of books and had been open by invitation only to his three sisters and only for purposes of being read to on occasion by the bookish boy. Mindful of this and never having had a room of my own, I was careful not to disturb the deserted privacy. I felt that he had been very fortunate growing up the way he had and now I too felt like a fortunate son. Not to give the impression that my girlfriend and I were passing the waning days of spring in Platonic innocence; we were in fact respectfully discreet in her family’s home. She was my sister when we kissed goodnight at her bedroom door, two doors down the hall from mine, and the next day my girlfriend again. We were in love and we were inseparable, which worried our parents some, as well it should have, because the only thing that we feared was the day it would all end. As the days grew warmer, summer approached with a cold foreboding unfamiliar to young hearts that had grown up yearning for the lazy days of summer. Not so this year. Christine and I braced ourselves against the ill winds of the coming season. Yet despite our desires, the days passed at an accelerating pace. An ever-shortening pendulum swung faster and faster and faster, unwinding our imaginary clock at an increasingly frantic rate until finally, terminally it ticked no more. Behind a church one night in Portland, Oregon we said our first tearful good-bye, and the next morning I embarked on my four-year odyssey. All we had after that were the love letters–an endless stream of them. We wrote each other virtually every day. Chapter Four The naval officer presiding over the swearing in ceremony was all "welcome aboard gentlemen" and friendly, like we were being invited into some kind of exclusive men’s club. He closed the door and then politely asked us to please face the flag hanging in the corner of the small room, place our hands over our hearts and repeat after him the oath to God, country and the United States Navy. Immediately following the "So help me God" part, the genial upbeat officer made a complete about-face. "Men,” he sneered, “up to the moment you raised your hands and took the oath, you were under no legal obligation, you could have walked out of here and gone home, but it’s too late for that, because now your sorry asses belong to the United States Navy. Welcome to communism boys"–just to rub it in. The door to freedom abruptly slammed shut for four long years. He then handed each of us a letter-size Manila envelope, our very first set of orders, with the admonishment, “Do not open them.” Our future was sealed. Next, a bright little fellow who looked remarkably like the boy on the Cracker Jacks box popped in. "Follow me,” He chirped. He then took us directly to a waiting van and straight to the Portland International airport. Gee, already I was beginning to see the world–and watching it disappear at the same time. I had never flown in an airliner before. Once I flew in a small plane with my mother and her boyfriend. He almost crashed into a cow pasture showing off for my mom. When it happened my brother and I were staring in amazement over Mom’s shoulder out the front window of the little single engine Stinson. As we broke through the puffy-white clouds, I wondered curiously why some cows were standing sideways on a vertical hillside directly in front of the airplane, seemingly defying gravity. At that instant the immense G-forces slammed me back into the seat as the plane screamed over the horns of a herd of stampeding cows. Still Mom was impressed–the guy could afford an airplane. Cracker Jack boy put us on a jet airliner and bid us, "good-bye and good luck." On the flight to San Diego the stewardesses treated us the same as the rest of the passengers: same food, same courtesy, and same respect–us bright eyed small-town boys going off on a big adventure. I didn’t realize it then, but that was the last time I would feel like a normal human being for four very long years. What I also didn’t realize was that we weren’t so much passengers as we were cargo: a half-dozen units of US government property being shipped from Portland, Oregon to San Diego, California, raw material, no different, fundamentally, than several ingots of pig iron going to a foundry to be cast into a cannon. Dear Christine, 7/14/66 I Am aboard a Boeing 720B, cruising about 600 mph. at 39,000 ft. and have just passed over Toledo (7:30) Later: Starting to descend toward San Francisco where I will board another jet for San Diego. Remember 10:00 Love you always, Chuck The above was hand-written on a postcard. On the back was inscribed "Compliments of ‘Battleship Oregon, Navy Mothers Club,’ Portland, Oregon." It was among several hundred letters in a cardboard box that Christine had stored in an attic for more than three decades. I had pretty much completed these reminiscences on Navy life when I decided to read those letters, thinking perhaps they might be useful in fleshing out some of the details of those years. They turned out to be not as much use in that regard as one might expect. I had little to report to her on the daily activities in training, the years at sea, and in my travels around the world. And there was only one letter left from the last year. The others had disappeared somewhere along the road to the twenty-first century. Only two letters from Christine remained, even though I sent them all back to her for safekeeping. Those letters were, at the time, a means of escape from a life that I found barely tolerable, not because that life was in itself so unbearable; hell it was, in many ways, no worse really than some of the craziness I’d already experienced as family life. I had however gotten a brief but delicious taste of freedom and independence and I was reluctant to give that up. So for four years I lived with the constant feeling that I was being cheated out of my life, like my fledgling wings had been clipped the moment I learned to fly and all I could do was imagine what it must have been like to soar freely through the changing world of the late Sixties. Being deprived for so long of my liberty, my love and my source of happiness ground away at me until I turned angrily against all that stood in my way. But surprisingly many of the letters refer to me as being one of the luckiest and happiest of the crew, wherever I was, always crediting Christine for that–for being my girl. She was my link to the real world, the place I called home. Recently, the long-running play "The Fantastics" closed in New York City after a record breaking forty odd years–at the same theater no less. Never having seen it, I was surprised to learn while watching a TV news program about the play’s closing that the song "Try to Remember" was actually written for the play. All these years I did not realize that. Then I found a letter to Christine that I had written from boot camp. "I’m listening to our song, The Fantastics’ ‘Try to Remember’ on the radio." Any song referring to September, when we would see each other again, became “our song.” I had merely forgotten that which I thought I had never known. After deplaning at the San Diego airport we wandered aimlessly away from the gate, not sure what to do next, looking for clues. Then out of nowhere a uniformed porter appeared and grabbed the orders right out of our hands. "Follow me,” he snapped, directing us toward the exit! We obediently followed though not quite sure why and certainly not so smartly. One of the guys whispered that this bossy porter was in fact a United States Marine in dress uniform. "Marine? Hey wait a minute. We joined the U.S. Navy." What the fuck’s going on? The marine hustled us over to the edge of the arrivals curb. "Shut your pie holes and stand on that line!" His commands were spoken with such authority that we did not for one instant consider disobeying them. We scooted our toes up to the yellow line, like he said. "Line ‘em up pukes." We lined them up. It was a little disconcerting not to mention embarrassing being spoken to in that manner, especially in front of all the people meeting loved ones or waiting nearby for cabs, strangers now who had for the past few hours been our fellow travelers. Now they to paid us no mind at all; they simply went about their business, indifferently. It was nothing to them… "Ten hut!" All of us knew what that meant from “Rin-Tin-Tin” or maybe from the “Sergeant Bilko” show, and we sure did know what to do and popped right to it. Still, it seemed to me, somewhat presumptuous of the marine to assume that we did at this point. "What’s that in your mouth maggot?" Excuse me? No one had ever called me a maggot before. I twitched. "Gum," I said, bristling belligerently. "What did you say to me maggot?" “It’s gum,” I said, “Care for a piece," stupidly wise-guying it? The marine’s jugular veins suddenly swelled up like somebody had shoved a tire pump up his ass and at that instant the last vestige of civilian life vanished like the flavor of the stale wad of chewing gum stuck between the teeth of my big mouth. He screamed two inches from my face. "SIR! GUM, SIR!" "Sir, gum, Sir." "I can’t hear you maggot!" "SIR, GUM, SIR!!!" "Get rid of it maggot." I started to move my hand towards my mouth, thinking I might be able to wipe some of the United States Marine’s spittle off my face and at the same time get rid of the offending gum. "Did I say you could move maggot?" "DID I MAGGOT?" "No Sir." "I CAN’T HEEEAR YOU MAGGOT!" "SIR NO SIR!" I was starting to get the hang of it already and getting a little tired of it at the same time. I spat my last piece of Beemans out into the arrival zone, as far as I could possibly get it. So there we waited…and waited…. and waited. The marine stood off to the side, distancing himself from us maggots. With his legs spread slightly apart and his hands locked behind his back, he stared blankly out toward the cars arriving to pick up those who were going about their enviable lives. Every so often the marine clicked his heels together and saluted another military guy–some sergeant or admiral. I didn’t know one from the other. I started to think about Christine. “Should have taken that college deferment. Should not have let this happen. Should have been paying better attention, been more on top of things. Shoulda, coulda, woulda. Oh well, too late to think about that now.” Sure hoped she wasn’t pregnant. That would sure complicate things. “Should have put my car on blocks. No, it was better to let Harry take care of it for me. That way it will be ready to drive soon as I get back home.” “No keg parties this summer. That’s for sure.” Couldn’t go long on airplane food, even in those days. I was getting a little hungry. Didn’t want to risk looking at my watch, but I was beginning to wonder how long we had been standing there doing absolutely nothing, like a bunch of edgy dogs made to sit in a row. I also wondered if we were impressing the United States Marine with how long we were able to stand at attention–us rugged Oregonian outdoorsmen. Before it was warm, now it was getting chilly. “Be nice if that fucking marine would just let us move around some, get the blood circulating a bit.”

There can be no assurance that U.S. demand for OCTG and line pipe will continue to recover. If the demand does not maintain its current level or increase or if there is a further decrease in demand, it could increase the competition we face, negatively impact our level of sales or profit margins and, accordingly, have a material adverse effect on our business, results of operations, financial condition or prospects.

His old employer-provided bronze plan was nearly $500/month and had a $6k/pp, $12k total deductible. It was the same coverage level as the catastrophic plan we’re signing up for now – nothing was covered, and we’re in medical debt paying off hospital bills. I was charged $150 for two aspirin during a hospital visit. One of us had a seizure this year and skipped medical attention because we were scared of the cost. When I fractured my elbow, I almost didn’t go to the hospital and was gonna cure it “on my own” with rest and ibuprofen, but my husband convinced me to go to the ER. On top of the $3k hospital bill, we had to pay an orthopedist $600 for less than five minutes of consultation time.

Mindy Kaling says that when DuVernay approached her about playing a role in Wrinkle, it was one of the first times she’d ever been sought out for a part. Kaling had created her own lane with The Mindy Project, a sitcom she wrote, produced, and starred in. “When you’re so used to creating your own roles,” she says, “it was very flattering and exciting.”