I can't believe I survived my life

I think it is the 50th anniversary of the JFK Assassination that takes me back to when I was 15 in 1963. And at that point when my whole life since then passes before me I realize, "I can't believe I survived my life!" Everything in my life that happened after that seemed kind of crazy to me then and now as well. For example, that day when President Kennedy was assassinated was: (remember this is a 15 year old boy I once was) went something like this: "Oh my God! If they can kill the President what hope do I have to survive to be even 20. I better stop being a virgin soon before I die too!" Yes. This is what I actually thought then! Even though it is quite funny to me now to think this way now, that was exactly what I thought in my mind then. Though girls had asked me out to go steady I was no more ready for that before this moment than flying to the moon. But, that day with the beautiful Mrs. Barr our 24 year old teacher in a mini-skirt and all the girls in the class crying together and the rest of us boys trying (some successfully) not to cry along with them and just trying to comfort them anyway we knew how as young men in a very uncomfortable and genuinely scary place were then all pretty much in shock and trauma because we also were at war (Cold War) ongoing with the Soviet Union and possibly Red China too. So, we were losing a president during wartime not peace time. So, this made it even more terrifying like losing FDR when he died during World War II like that.

So, within the next month I asked a beautiful blonde blue eyed girl who sat next to me in class that I had had my eye on for at least a month or two out and she said "Yes". So, we went to see something like "Beach Blanket Bingo" (an Annette Funicelo movie with Frankie Avalon or someone like that) set on the California Beaches near where I lived in Glendale in the Los Angeles Area in California then. By the way, even though I started going out and even going steady with girls for 1 or 2 years each from then on in my life I stayed a technical virgin until I was 21 even though I started spending nights with girls by the time I was 16. I was a churchgoing person and always a gentleman and this was expected of me always. So, I always took good care of women and was chivalrous. I found myself always in demand with women because of this.

All of us had expected to die the year before during October 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

My father and I were doing electrical work for a very rich beautiful young woman in her late 20s or early 30s. (People grew up faster then than now). She was packing her car and shaking and moving to her cabin in the Sierras so she wouldn't die in the nuclear blasts as Los Angeles was incinerated by the "coming nuclear War". I asked my father (I would have been 14 then but helping my Dad with Electrical work. He had been training me as an Electrician's Helper summers and weekends since I was 12). I was very big for my age so most people thought I was 16 or 17 even when I was 12. Because I was kind of quiet and didn't talk a lot I could kind of pull that off too because I was always very intelligent and self disciplined like my father.

That day as the crying shaking client packed her car and left to avoid the coming nuclear holocaust in Los Angeles I asked my father, "Dad. Are we all going to die like she said?" He said, "That's a bunch of BS. We are going to be just fine." (He didn't tell her that because she was too hysterical. He just let her do what she had to do to survive her life and drive to her cabin in the Sierras).

The 1960s were very scary on many many fronts. None of us really expected to survive those times. People today are a lot more rational and logical now. Then people were still getting over World War II and the Korean War and the Viet Nam War was just started by Kennedy to do that proxy war rather than  blow up the whole world.

So, looking back from now the Viet Nam War was to try to make a small war instead of nuking the whole planet out of existence. I suppose you could say that this worked because we are all still here today. 

At the time 1965 and 1966 I expected to be drafted and to die in Viet Nam. That isn't what I wanted but to some degree this was expected of us then. And many many of the boys I knew were drafted and died there or even more were worse than that, they didn't die but came home as emotional basket cases that were never going to be completely functional again because of PTSD and many killed themselves, their families, their friends, innocent bystanders as they had flash backs and thought they were still killing the North Vietnamese soldiers somewhere in Viet Nam. But instead they were killing their family and friends and strangers back here in the U.S.

But, I wasn't drafted because my father had me sign on my draft card that I thought I should have a medical deferment. Because the Blunt Trauma childhood epilepsy that had almost killed me between the ages of 10 to 15 also kept me alive by giving me a 4F classification which basically meant that unless the mainland United States was attacked in force I would not be called up for duty as a soldier.

The world was completely different then in almost every way. I can't believe any of us survived all that. But somehow some of us did.