ICC Intro part one

IMHOTEP CONSTRUCTION COMPANY

On time and under budget-No job too small

Dear Reader,

Some years ago I started out from my adopted home in Hawaii on a journey that I hoped would bring me some insight into "the Meaning of Life". I was divorced for the second time and burned out with my teaching job at Leeward Community College. One of my courses, entitled “Communicating Human Thought”, had taught me that though humans certainly could communicate, there was little of value that they would communicate. The USA was embroiled in the Viet Nam fiasco, Nixon was President and my best students had run away to Canada or wherever to escape the draft and the insanity.

I sold the sailboat I had been living on in the Ala Wai Harbor, finished off what little "business" I had in Hawaii and flew to California to say goodbye to my parents with a vague plan of traveling around the world close to the equator.

I had only been at my parents’ home for a few days when I got a letter from a colleague in Hawaii informing me that my best friend, Elizabeth English, had been killed in the crash of a small private plane into the sea offshore Maui. This abrupt end to our physical relationship, the connection that meant the most to me at the time, truly cut the umbilical cord to my past. I was disconsolate but free, white and fairly young.

Elizabeth and I had hoped to meet somewhere during my travels, (Maybe in that little café in Venice where if you sit long enough you will see everyone you know.) so I thought I might as well continue travelling since I had nothing else in mind to do. I thought my trip would take my mind off my loss and would last, at the most, one year.

But once I got started I found I liked travelling more than anything else I had ever done. I slowly went around the world, mainly on the equator, and, when I got back to Hawaii two years later, I was not ready to settle down by any means. So I just kept moving--and, in a way, I still am.

Of course since that first trip I have spent several years back in the States (not Hawaii), but I have also lived and worked in South America, Africa, Europe and Asia. It has been an interesting life for me and I would like to add to the “Book of Life” by sharing with you some of the things I have thought about and done. Though I have accomplished nothing of note, I have tried to live in what I hoped was a “mythic way”.

(To be continued)

Tomasito (Thomas F. Wold)

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