MEET EFR DION -- HE'D BE GOING ON 99

MJT Dion, Dion, EFR Dion

Look at that guy.  Must not have been a very good day. He would never tell you though.  You'd see it 60 years later like we are now. I've told you before that he had constant pain from a very young age.  It's a long story and not the one I want to tell this time.  I have been thinking of him for a couple days now. I thought that it would go away.  Ha!  When he grabs me he doesn't let go.  He probably thinks that I should stop talking about him in the past tense.  That would be like him.  Without scolding me, he would make the point that if I really believed I would know to talk about him in the present tense.   So, anyway, here I am trying to solve the problem about why the presence of the One and Only is constantly on my mind.  It happened when out of the blue I started to get pangs of guilt and regret for something I did that was really stupid when I was about 13 or 14...I'm not even sure about that.  I think back on it now and I remember all the times that I had bragged about him about this one accomplishment of his.  But never to him...and in fact worse than that.  I remember it like it was five minutes ago.
EFR Dion never graduated from high school.  There was no chance for equivalency tests to challenge in those days.  He was of high school age when his father, also Eugene died.  EFR Dion was now the "head of household" of nine people.  He was in the seminary, preparing for the priesthood in the Roman Catholic Church.  He was now the head of the Dion Domestic Church.  I don't know the whole story, but I do know that he did get work as he got to be of age.  Somewhere we have a picture of him in front of the Chapman Valve Company which in those days was in Chicopee, Massachusetts somewhere.  I never heard the full story of how he broke into the machine shops.  I do know that he had to be one smart dude.  So good that at the ripe old age of 22 or so he was a foreman at the Worthington Pump company.  So good that they entrusted him to be a general foreman at their plant in Hackensack, New Jersey.  When he got married after sparking MJT for four years, the company did him the favor of transferring him back to Holyoke, Massachusetts.  Superintendent of the airplane engine division on Bridge Street in Holyoke.  Don't ask me how he did it.  I could go on for a long time, but I want to get to the point of my insult to him.  I found out that he was planning to challenge the Massachusetts state accreditation exam for the licensing of tool engineers.  He talked about it a bit, and I was polite and nice, but I couldn't even master long division, what did I care about engineers and slide rules?  To make a long story not quite so long, he took the test, waited for the results and found out that he had knocked it out of the ball-park.  He was flying high, he could not stop trying to find words to explain his joy and his triumphant sense of accomplishment.  I was bored and I didn't take the time to try to dig into his heart to see why he was so totally consumed with his victory.  I was so stupid!  He must have realized that I was to ignorant to understand what he was going through.  He never changed his attitude toward me and never once made me feel that he had been offended by my behavior.
It took me years, literally years, before I came to the full understanding of the feat that he had pulled off.  Part of my understanding was driven into me because as a recruiter of technical and professional people, I came to interview a host of  bozos who could never have been given the time of day by ole EFR Dion.  And they had diplomas backing up their engineering inability.  So, there you go.  We all have to be guilty of at least one thing that we can talk about.  This is the biggest one that I can talk about.  No, the other one you may be thinking of is not even close to being a slice of guilt.
So, now it is off to lala land.
The weather is cooling off.  If this keeps up you'd think that it's threatening to be Winter in these parts.  It might be time to start thinking of moving to New Zealand for a few months.