I can still feel the metal under my feet on that USN ship in Alameda. It was early to mid-sixties Fremont and our den went on a field trip to a grey metallic beast with roaring hot diesel breath and passage doors that had lots of handles not just one and it felt like sneaking into a vault of secret machinery that could kill in a heartbeat. The main passage had a dozen doors down the arching hallway and on each side more doorways with uniformed men and strange noises and insider talk with secret words and at the end of it all a miracle of fountains of colored liquids in plastic cubes and a lunch line with real metal trays not the schoolyard plastic stuff and the vivid memory of being asked if I wanted a second ice cream. I hadn't tasted such adventure in my lifetime and I left thinking if I could muster the opportunity to show them I'd be whatever they required to be a part of something that fed this well. This is an aside that in the mid-sixties America wasn't fed as well as the abundance we see today but I was sold. I wanted to upgrade my uniform and have the adventure with a metal sailing beast some day.

The second story and formation memory was the opposite. I was given a handbook of Scout-o-rama raffle tickets and directed out the door into my neighborhood so I could earn the passage to the upcoming big event. No guide no backup no training just go knock on doors and people will give you money for a good cause. The first and final door I knocked on that hot summer morning was only because it was a screen door with a TV on in the background. I knocked stepped back off the first concrete porch step and straightened my cub scout neckerchief and stood as proudly as I could until I was met with the man of the house in dingy-white boxer shorts and a tank-top that didn't cover his huge gorilla-haired belly. WHAT DO YOU WANT he bellered. I quivered and tried to make my pitch. Before I had even been heard out he shouted NOOO slammed his inner door on my terror and left me in tears. In that moment my dreams of becoming a man and a sailor were crushed. I didn't have it in me to face this human gorilla how could I ever qualify for REAL ribbons and battle medallions. I think that was near the end of my scouting days. We moved into the Sierra Nevada foothills shortly after that and I carried both a vision and a fear of being unqualified from my first battlefield the Scout-o-rama which I didn't qualify to attend.

I spent decades with the Scouts honor both inspiring me and judging me.

On my honor I will do my best to do my duty to God and my country and to obey the Scout Law to help other people at all times to keep myself physically strong mentally awake and morally straight.

Well that's not quite the way to put it. The words were in me anyway even when the uniform came off and the neighborhood doors stopped opening and the years piled up with their own doors slamming. The oath became the throughline across the glacier fall and the stillbirth of my daughter Cristie and the dissolution of a twenty-year marriage and the business deaths and the three trans-America bicycle rides in search of WIDWID. It was the same words that kept me showing up when the cheaper path was visible and the costly one was the only one that kept the blade sharp.

Now I have a super-power story-telling self-mastery and a navy of AI to make sense of the chaos. And yes I have a vessel named Intelligent Netware. The oath that formed me at ten is still guiding me at seventy-one because it was never about the ribbons or the medallions or even the ship. It was about doing my best to do my duty when no one was watching and when the doors slammed and when the years demanded more than the boy on the porch could have imagined. The same words sit inside the work of passing formation forward so the next generation does not have to fall on their own glacier first.