[pedonbio]

The older I get the more interesting I find people to be, even solvegas.  

I don't know whether this thread will go anywhere, but I don't mean to write about famous people, or inspiring people, or even people we know well. Just interesting folk.

A few years ago when I was gradually closing out my practice, I had a client, a guy about my age, for whom I did some work. I had an appointment for him to go over some paperwork and finish our business. He came to the office wearing a Navy baseball cap, not an uncommon sight around Seattle. But it was from the U.S.S. Indianapolis. For anyone who has seen Jaws several times, that is interesting. The ship had delivered the Hiroshima atom bomb to Tinian Island; on its way back to Pearl Harbor it was torpedoed. Given the secrecy of its mission, no distress signal was sent, so it wasn't missed for a week. Of the 1,500 man crew, 1,200 survived the sinking, but most were lost to sharks. I knew he was too young to have served on her, so I asked and we got into a long conversation.

His older brother had been aboard and had been lost. The family, he told me, chose to believe that his brother had been killed when the torpedo hit, and never asked for more details. It was an interesting way to deal with death, and reminded me of a brief scene in M.A.S.H. in which a doctor changed the date of death for a man who was killed. "Nobody dies on Christmas Eve," he said.

[solvegas]

The older I get the more interesting I find people to be, even solvegas.  

Cute, very cute.   One of the most interesting men I got to know died three years ago of pancreatic cancer.   We called him " Shaky " even though his real name was Curley. He was a Army veteran of the Vietnam war. He never really talked much about of what he did in South West Asia but at work I was told he had been in Special Operations. Shaky was about 5' 4 " tall, 130 pounds but he had a grip that could squeeze blood from a rock. When we went to the gun range to qualify he would always have a score of 250 which is perfect and his rounds were all in a 2 inch pattern within the target bulls eye even at 25 yards which is amazing with a pistol.   Anyways, I was invited to his house, along with most of the Security department veterans, to a 4th of July cook out. As I was looking at some  pictures on the wall of his study, I saw some when he was 19 in 1968. I saw one of him and three other buddies who were shirtless **94** some hooch and getting plastered. Shaky's wife Brenda saw me looking at the photo and told me those other three men did not survive the war. Brenda said Shaky was a tunnel rat in Vietnam with 14 kills verified. She knew this not because Shaky told her but because she saw one of his decorations was a Distinguished Service Cross and Shaky's old commanding officer told her what it was for. Shaky was credited for saving the lives of a platoon  in one of his missions. For those too young to know, a tunnel rat was usually a small guy armed with a 1911 Colt .45 and a flashlight who would crawl into a Viet Cong tunnel and reconnoiter it and give the intelligence to the unit. Tunnels were dark and extensive and when the man sent didn't come back you could figure he was found and killed by the Viet Cong. That explained why when dealing with irate guests at the Luxor he wouldn't lose his cool regardless of what was said but if you touched him in any way he didn't like you would be on your back seeing stars. He used to take down much younger and bigger men in the nightclub and he loved the grave yard shift. He was originally from the Ozarks mountain region of Arkansas. And he was a great story teller. He could spin a whopper of a yarn and you would have to guess if it was true or a lie. He retired from the Army in 1989 as a Top Sergeant. He was 62 when he passed away.  

[pedonbio]

Years ago I worked with a Khmer guy who was becoming a U.S. citizen. He had an odd first name, derived from the founder of modern Germany. He explained that his father had been a teacher in Pnom Pehn and greatly admired the founder of Germany. When the Khmer Rouge took over they had tracked down all the teachers, and his father had been executed in their front yard. He told me that they were lucky, because teachers were considered too Westernized, but their families were not. Doctors were considered to have Westernized their families, so the whole family was killed. His mother had taken him and fled into Thailand where they had lived in a refugee camp until they were granted asylum in the U.S. He owns an ice creamery now.

[TheZookie007]

One of the most interesting women I ever met died earlier this year. She was in her 90s. While she was growing up in her small village in the south of England, she rarely if ever came across any non-white people. She started teaching in the village school and one fine day, a man from Sierra Leone came visiting. Whatever for, I can't recall now. In any case, she took one look at him and fell headlong in love. He felt the same. Within a week they had made plans to get married. Within two weeks, she had left her job. Another week later, they were in the registry office in London, and she had obtained a passport, her first. A week after that, she and her now-husband set sail for Freetown. Together, they had eight children. He predeceased her by a month.