Tag: eagle

A Work Dream

Despite not working for anyone since 2016, I had another work-related dream last night. This wasn’t from my last employment with IBM but was with one of the medical startups from earlier, shortly after retiring from the U.S. Air Force.

We were in a large, clean, bright room. The company’s engineering section, thirteen people, including their director, were at tables shoved together across the room. I, the lone marketing person, sat on the room’s other side, alone.

Wanting to be involved, I moved over there and asked for permission to sit in on their meeting. They were developing the product I would market, after all, and I was part of the team that collected input on the product’s design. The director and others said, “Sure,” so I sat at the edge, so I wouldn’t be intrusive.

Note that all of these people were known co-workers from real life from two different medical device startups.

Not feeling included, I left after a short period, returning to my space. But I had nothing to do; no assignments, no emails, no phone calls.

With no warning, children suddenly swarmed our workspace. I don’t know why they were there. Crossing back to the engineers, I discovered that they were gone, then spotted them leaving the building.

I followed them out. They were going up a dirt path into the mountains, past large boulders and pine trees. One said, “Look, there’s a huge bald eagle up there.” He pointed.

I nodded; I’d heard about the bird earlier and had seen it. I didn’t know what the engineers were doing. Seemed like it could’ve been some team-building exercise, so I left again.

Heading back down to our office, I realized that my boss was in Paris for a trade show. I’d not heard anything from her, which was unusual. Then I realized that she hadn’t included me in any of the show prep.

Deciding that I didn’t really have a job, I thought that I should probably look for new employment and began compiling a resignation letter in my mind as I walked.

Dream end.

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Can You Remember?

On this day, the moon landing took place.

I remember it. I was a newly-minted thirteen-year-old. I watched the historic event downstairs. Downstairs was the cellar, or basement, as we called it, in Penn Hills, Pennsylvania. That’s where the family room, laundry room, garage, and my bedroom were located. It used to flood when it rained hard. Fortunately, the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, suburb only experienced rain about half of the year.

The lights were off in the family room, and cool air bathed the space. Sitting on the couch, the one that used to be upstairs before we bought new living room furniture, I watched Eagle land on the moon on a big Magnavox console color television. I always thought the television was stolen and purchased from a fence. Even when new, it had a small area in the upper right corner where the picture tube – televisions had picture tubes, back then – appeared cracked. At least, what it showed was a distorted bubble of rainbow colors.

It was good enough to watch the moon landing, though. There wasn’t even a need to rotate the outdoor antenna or adjust the rabbit ears. All three major networks were carrying the event. We only had the three, then. Cable news wasn’t carrying it, because cable hadn’t proliferated around the nation like a blackberry bramble gone wild, and there weren’t any national cable news channels. They were still in our future.

We were excited about the future, despite what was happening and had happened. Perhaps I was only excited because I was young. The Vietnam war still continued, and Nixon was in the White House. Watergate was still a few years away. So was our first gasoline crises since World War II. Microwaves were only emerging, and we mostly played music on forty-five and thirty-three R.P.M. vinyl records. We also listened to music on radios, especially in our cars, especially A.M. It was pretty impressive that our old Dodge had a push-button radio. Later on, after the first man walked on the moon and made his famous utterance, I went outside and gazed up at the stars, wondering what the future would bring.

All in all, it was a pretty cool night.

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