Half-hearted

The comely and kind-hearted Miss Brenda and the Colonel have a fifty-year anniversary coming up shortly. 

No, it hasn't been fully five decades since their nuptials.  They tied the knot in 1976.

The Colonel would like to take you back a few years before that, and ask you the question: 

"Where were you in the summer of '71?"    

The answer to that question is not important.  This blog post ain't about you.  It's about the Colonel and Miss Brenda, and now that the Colonel has gained your attention via the artifice of insult, he'll tell you a story about two half-hearted kids who found the other halves of their hearts.

Fifty years ago this month, the Colonel was finishing up a rather lack-luster (half-hearted, if you will) matriculation at Curundu Junior High in the Panama Canal Zone, and half-heartedly preparing for his rather lackluster matriculation at Balboa High School in same said Canal Zone.

As an aside, Curundu Junior High School, Balboa High School, and the Canal Zone exist today only in fading memories of a vibrant and productive slice of American Exceptionalism erased from existence by men who hated their own country's exceptionalism.  But, as important as that thought is to the history and future of our Republic, and as much as the Colonel would dearly love to climb atop his pedantic pedestal and wax warningly about the suicidal slide into irrelevancy begun by those men who hated their own country's exceptionalism, that topic has little bearing on the the subject of the Colonel's current missive.

So, he'll stick a pin in it.

But, he'll reserve the right to dive, without warning, back into those pusillanimity-infested waters, Marine Corps K-bar fighting knife clinched in his coffee-stained teeth, his pudgy fingers pounding out a staccato stream of vitriolic condemnation...

Apologies...; the Colonel's coffee is particularly strong this morning.

Now, where was the Colonel?

Oh, right. He was about to begin his matriculation at Balboa High School in the Panama Canal Zone.  

Those were halcyon days, my friends.  Living in the tropics, in communities carved out of the rainforests, astride a monumental achievement of American ingenuity and fortitude carved through mountains and swamps to link the world's two great oceans and thereby all the world.  

Two seasons -- wet and dry.

Swimming year-round.  

Fishing so easy it almost got boring. 

Exposure to cultures from across the globe.

Is there little wonder the Colonel viewed school as a distraction?

And then, school faded even further into the recesses of things to which he was supposed to be paying attention..., but wasn't.

There was a girl.

And, wonder of wonders, that girl was paying attention to the Colonel.  

Today, when the comely and kind-hearted Miss Brenda asks the Colonel, 

"Knucklehead, what did you see in me all those years ago?", 

...the Colonel unfailingly and truthfully answers, 

"I saw how you looked at me."

You know how there are these points in your life when what matters most to you crystalizes and then incandesces into a light that places all else in the shadows?  You know what the Colonel is talking about -- when your approach to the previous things in your life was half-hearted at best, and suddenly there was something or someone that your heart desired above all else; that was so special that half of your heart just wouldn't do.    

The Colonel's life really began fifty years ago.

Those five decades took him from one far-flung outpost of our Republic's exceptional reach to another, through great personal triumphs and heights of pride so lofty it seemed his heart would explode and hard knocks so cruel the Colonel's heart seemed to shrink like a forgotten fruit desiccated on the vine.  

All along the way, there was that girl with a heart big enough for the two of them.