Retrospective, 2007-10-07

Chuck Oates
7 October 2007

Rev. 12 October 2007
Norman, Oklahoma, USA

Retrospective

A few weeks ago I posted the lyrics of the Kingston Trio song "Desert Pete" on this blog with the thought that it would be obvious why the song appealed to me. Upon reconsideration, I've decided to risk stating or re-stating the obvious.

I was given access to a pump and a jar of water to prime it by my grandparents, Lee G. Oates and Juanita M. Oates. The son of a couple who married at age 17 and 19, who welcomed my arrival a year or two later, but divorced not too long after my birth, I was something of a toddler wandering the desert when adopted by my grandparents at the ripe old age of 19 months. I don't know how my life might have turned out with my birth parents, a high school dropout turned file clerk and an Army Air Corps enlisted man, but I know for sure how it turned out with a Latin teacher turned lower grade elementary school teacher for 30 years and her entrepreneur husband, a mechanical engineer sans a degree.

My "bottle" was filled with opportunities to see much of the United States, with all manner of books and recordings, with trips to the library ("Internet" was spelled l-i-b-r-a-r-y in the dinosaur days), and with the love of stable, facilitating parents. As a young fellow, I pumped the handle pretty much like there was a fire. A satellite launched in October 1957 by the Soviet Union ensured that there was ample opportunity to pump like crazy, in fact.

Before too long, the welcome sounds of water gurgling from below and flowing freely from the pump came in the form of a good engineering/software job (a string of them really), a lovely caring wife, and the world's best parents-in-law. After quite a long wait, a beautiful, willful, scary-smart, and astonishingly perceptive daughter was added to the mix and my life was about as good as it could possibly get. I drank long and deep of these cool refreshing treats for many, many years.

Four years ago, the closing of Organon Teknika/bioMérieux's Oklahoma City production facility—an opportunity, cloaked as usual in the form of an impending disaster—gave me a chance to return to teaching after a 30 year hiatus. I'm now trying to leave the bottle full for others through a nominally-compensated adjunct teaching job that I can now afford (sort of) at Oklahoma City Community College. Many of my students want very badly to learn the medication math that's required to become health care professional, and that makes it a joy to teach, though I'm learning at least as much from my students as they're learning from me.

If I die tomorrow, I will have still accomplished a great many of the things I set out to do as a kid, although it's certainly come in a form different from the career in researching low-temperature physics and translating Russian technical articles that I set out to build.*

I thank the Lord and thank the pump and I thank old Desert Pete.

--Prof. Oates

^^^^ .

(FINALLY got that title after all these years!)

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*But thank you, "Dr." Kaye, for magnificent career inspiration!