Maybe everyone has a pivotal moment in time when a simple choice sets you irrevocably on a course that carries you out of your simple, ordinary life and into the hands of something larger and more powerful than you can imagine. I know Carl did. Born a simple Rural Illinois farm boy as the depression was heading for their world and the world wars were a future as yet unpredicted. Never dreaming of Wyoming until his sisters became mail order brides to Wyoming cowboy/trappers/stage drivers. Then he left the corn fields and the milk cows and came looking for sagebrush and hay and beef cattle. Here he must think he is creating his own future and he was. Deciding to ride this horse into the Silver Dollar Salloon in Cody, Wyoming was a young mans foolishness - meeting the sherrif of Park County gave him the choice of Jail or joining the army. Getting captured and force marched and starved on the Baatan death march and then dying of infection in a POW camp could not have been the choice he thought he was making when he got on the horse and gave a click of his tongue and squeezed his knees and urged the horse forward through the swinging Salloon doors.
This story reminds me of my niece's recent months and her lamenting over choices she made that have effected her into young adulthood. We never really know, do we?
October 13th, 2014
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