Featuring Furthermore

Heart of Darkness

Still another lesson: you can make up your own lessons, and draw on them as needed. Had I decided that my friends were out there, had I been able to admit I needed help, and been willing to solicit it, things would have been different. Instead, I only learned from the lesson that said when you’re hurting, quit. Wrong lesson. But the choice of lessons is always ours. Choose wisely.

Note: This account of my Peace Corps experience is taken from my unpublished memoir, “Remember Me,” about my best friend, Jay Fox.

I FINALLY GRADUATED college in June 1969 with a bachelor’s degree in history. It had been a long strange trip through academia, altogether six years – during which I dropped out twice and spent a year overseas. But I still wasn’t ready for a job – the “real world,” we called it, where we would “be productive” and hardworking. For one thing I still had a rampant case of wanderlust. But without a continuing deferment, the draft loomed, dark and threatening, like an approaching storm.

Jay had a medical deferment . . .