It was 1976,  America turned 200 and I was 21.  I was living in a cracker box two bedroom house with my wife and baby girl in Westminster, California.   We were poor.  Being on food stamps poor.  I had a job in route sales, delivering packaged sandwiches to convenience stores all over Orange County.  The wife was waiting tables at the local Sizzler Steakhouse.  We also had a German Shepard named Angie.  I rented the house from my mother who lived next door.

That’s me sitting at the kitchen table calculating the statistics for the softball team I captained.  The Ringwraiths.  We of course didn’t have personal computers or the internet in those days.  That calculator I’m using was pretty high tech stuff for me.  We did have a 21″ RCA color television.  A Christmas gift from mom and dad.

My luck was going to change for the better a couple of months down the road when I hired on with the United States Postal Service as a letter carrier.  The pay back then was $5.25 per hour and of course I got the full benefit package (health insurance, paid leave, and for the first time in my young life, job security).

Funny thing is, I don’t recall ever feeling put out by my financial situation.  Truth be told, I guess I didn’t know any better.  I had grown up in a working class family.  We didn’t have a nice house, stylish clothes or fancy cars, but we had food on the table and a roof over our heads.  So, I guess it was just what I was used to.  Which is not to say I didn’t envy the nice things others had, but I didn’t begrudge them the trappings of success (or at least the good fortune of having high income parents).

Things were what that were, we made the best of it, and hell, we were generally pretty damn happy most of the time.  We had a tent and we’d frequently go camping.  We had good friends.  Marijuana was cheap.  Life was good.

All these years later I find myself once again living in a two bedroom house (albeit significantly larger and paid for), comfortable in my status as a government pensioner, sitting at the kitchen table writing this remembrance on a notebook computer to post on the Internet.   I guess I’d tell that young man in the photograph that things would find a way of working themselves out.  But I’m thinking he somehow already knows that.

Life is grand, isn’t it?

The Ringwraiths (yeah, we were all really into Tolkien in those days).  Let’s see how many names I can remember.  Front row (L-R): Unknown, Dutch Griffin (my then wife’s ex-boyfriend), Chuck Martin, unknown, Doug Price (our star player), my brother Keith.  Back row: Unknown, Jim Meehan, Rod Headlee, Larry Raemakers, and me.

I got most of them, not bad for an old stoner I’d say.