The Future Was A Total Blank

     One’s future is always full of curve balls, and you never really know what’s going to happen.  All during my childhood, I had pretty broad-brush ideas about my future, although the specifics were never clear.  I would go to elementary school, I would go to high school, and I would go to university. 

    Once I was in university, I was supposed to have had some idea of what I wanted to do with my life, so I could choose a major in that field and learn about how to do it.  Unfortunately for me, I couldn’t really come up with a career that I wanted to spend my life doing, and I began to question what I was doing in college.  (The photo above shows me in “Marat Sade”, one of the dramas I was in during my university years.  That’s me as one of the lunatics in the asylum, standing in the very center-front.)

     The idea of dropping out of university was really not in the cards because of the Vietnam War that was going on at the time, and that war was something I was morally against.  I had followed the news religiously and knew the history of the conflict, despite what the political propaganda explanations were.   I had a bumper sticker on my car which said, “How many Vietnamese Fought in Our Civil War?” 

    If I dropped out of university, I would lose my Selective Service deferment and would be drafted into the military, a place I would not go.  I would go to prison first.  

    My mother suggested that I “major in education, you can always get a teaching job.”  I didn’t know what else to major in, so I took her advise and majored in education.   I figured I might like to become an elementary school teacher.   Looking back, education was a good choice, not because I had a career in teaching, but because it opened some doors to me, later allowing me to immigrate to Canada.

    Anyway, I didn’t particularly want to get a teaching job immediately after graduating, even though that would give me another draft deferment.  I wanted some kind of adventure in my life, not just settling down into a humdrum teaching job in the community I grew up in.  I wracked my brain trying to come up with a solution that offered both a military deferment, and at the same time, give me some kind of adventure.   

    The solution I came up with was joining the Peace Corps.  I sent in an application and filled out all of the forms, and in March of 1969, just months before I graduated, I was accepted into the Peace Corps.  I was assigned to a program in the Philippines, for elementary science teachers.  I was very excited to learn that our two and a half month Peace Corps Training, would take place in Hawaii.  It looked like I had an inkling of what the next few years of my life would be, but I didn’t see the curve ball.

More tomorrow.

View my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca