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Show would make it to the top of the pyramid. A career outside the military held little interest. How could working for a corporation or a law firm hold the same excitement as foreign policy or international negotiations? In fact, he rarely considered a future in which he did not don a uniform every morning, could not begin to imagine how days in the civilian world might unfold. At various points in her life, usually when she was asking if she could work fewer hours at the mall or resign as an officer of some organization or another, he had reminded his daughter of the importance of being the best that ever was in whatever she did. Make sure, he would say, once you leave a job people long afterwards say, Jennifer Sinor was the best that ever was. It didn't matter if she was taking orders at Wally Wok or running the.country. As an example, he would offer his own career, jobs he had held where no one had ever matched his skill or service, compliments he had received, awards he had won. That is so arrogant, she would think. But arrogance had nothing to do with it, though poverty might. Life, he thought, hinged on certain pivotal moments, moments that defined or destroyed you, like the time a teacher took him aside and told him he had limits. Things were supposed to get better once we left the East coast and headed west. My mom felt that the pace and expense of the East coast chaffed at my father and made him unhappy. Once we regained the open spaces of the prairies, land long familiar to my father, he would worry less about the cost of museums and amusement parks and focus instead on the beauty before us. By the time we hit Nebraska my dad had become quite 205 |