A good friend of mine sent out a group blast e-mail yesterday announcing his retirement. This is the second time in his life that he’s retired. If there is anybody in my life that I look to as a father figure it was/is COL B. He’s a living breathing John Wayne if there ever was one. A former Army officer and life long State Trooper he’s earned a happy retirement.
It’s hard for me to see him in that light though. Seldom does a day go by that I don’t use at least one of the lessons that he taught me. Retiring the day before Veterans Day is simply poetic.
"No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were: any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee."
John Donne, 1623, from "Devotions upon Emergent Occasions"
