The Renaissance Man.

How does a man become a Renaissance Man and what is a Renaissance Man?

The definition I like from the dictionary is a "Modern learner who is always attempting to acquire more than superficial knowledge about many different interests."

Most men are well trained in their particular avocation. After all, this is how they earn the income to support themselves and their families. They
have little time to pursue other areas of knowledge. The interesting thing about educating yourself beyond the area of supporting yourself is that
the more educated you become about many different areas of knowledge, the more you want to learn. It's like good wine, you want more.

Once a man is relieved of the shoulder harness and walking the same daily path and pulling the same load, a man is free to get off that rutted trail
and explore other trails of knowledge. When we are young, we had the opportunity to do so and now that we're retired we have that opportunity.

For instance, when I was young I read incessantly about any and everything. My parents had bought a set of Compton encyclopedias from a door to
door salesman. In all fairness, the set is about half the number of books in a set today. I would read each book many times over from cover to cover.
I did this between 9 and 12 years old. By doing that, it gave me knowledge that there was a heluva lot more to learn than what they taught you in school.

Also, as a young kid, I learned I could change the points and condensor on my various motor bikes and later on, on my cars. I could change a flat tire on a car or motor bike.I learned to replace the shear pin on my outboard motor. I learned to adjust the solid valve push rods on my 6 cylinder volvo boat engine.

In high school, my spyder gear in the rear end went out due to my popping the clutch on my 51 Ford. I took it out and went to a junk yard and got another
one and spent nearly all day replacing it.

I had a 3 speed transmission on my Harley 45 cubic inch motorcycle. I changed the left foot operated clutch to a suicide clutch by cutting off the lower part and the spring that would hold the clutch engaged. So, in order to stop, I would press the clutch lever down and have to hold it down till I was ready to start moving. I could only stop with my right leg holding the bike up. Unfortunately, I trashed a lot of transmission as when I would shift with my left hand on the shift knob mounted on the left sided of my gas tank, the clutch lever would engage very abrubtly.
I paid for the first transmission rebuild and watched over the mechanics shoulder to show me how. I rebuilt it three times after that.

I have always changed the engine oil and filter on every car I owned until the quick oil change places came out. I got lazy then. But, I do change the oil on my two boat engines as well as the oil on the two outdrives.

The point I'm making is that I was not a trained professional mechanic, but I was willing to learn how to do some mechanical jobs as accomplishing then
was fun and rewarding and leaves you with a sense of accomplishment. I change all the water pump impellers on my boat. When I first did it, it was a knuckle
busting slow process. I've done it so many times now, it's a breeze. I replaced the carburator on the Kohler generator set on my boat after screwing up the old
carburator trying all sorts of things to get it started.

Yes, I will admit I've fixed things until I've broken them. But, I did put the effort in and won't make the same mistake twice.

I'm no electrician. But, I've changed light fixtures, put up many ceiling fans, changed light switches. Well, the electrical panel was dated in our Albuquerque
home and a leak in the garage roof had allowed water to enter the panel. It was badly rusted and the several of the breaker fuses were bad. I could find
no replacements for these fuses as no one made them anymore. I decided to replace the whole damn panel. I dove into it and managed to do it in one full
day last June. I always had it in the back of my head that If I ran into a problem I couldn't solve, I could stop and always call an electrician.

I'm no plumber, but I've replaced bath and kitchen water faucets. Really pretty simple these days with flexible screw on lines. I've replaced a dishwasher here
in my Albuquerque place as well as a garbage disposal. Pretty simple and straight forward. I've replaced many toilets in my various homes over the years.
The hot water heater went out in my Albuquerque home. I went down and picked on up from Lowes and brought it back and Carmen and I replaced it.The only hard part was the soldering which took me a while to get the hang of.

I'm not a tile professional, but I've set 4 inch by 4 inch tiles around every door, window and opening in my Florida home. It took me about a week. I got the
idea from a home I'd seen in California. I've laid saltillo tile and laid broken tiles in a home we had in Louisiana.

I'm not a bricklayer, but have done a lot of repair jobs over the years. The latest were the bricks had all come lose from two large planters by my dock.
It took me a few hours to replace the bad bricks and to straighten the walls etc. I built a brick barbecue pit in a Louisiana home and Carmen and I both
laid a brick patio in the back of the home and erected a 6ft. fence around it.

I'm no professional house painter, but Carmen and I have repainted the exterior of our Florida home twice. I use the roller and she uses the brush for the small
places. Carmen and I put up crown moulding in all our rooms in Florida last year.

The point is, I was never trained in any of these endeavors , but felt that if somebody else can do it, I'll give it a try even if I fail.

Retired as I am, there is no reason why I can't continue to learn about new things.

One damn thing I will never ever do again is fixing a flat. I worked in my uncle's service station one summer when I was 16. I learned to break the tire from
the wheel and repair it. That was hard and it was before the mechanical ones the shops have today. Getting the tire on and off the wheel was not a job
for sissies and especially so for a larger truck tire. I know my right arm doubled in size from swinging the large hammer hitting the crowbar like device.

I'm not a professional welder, but learned to use a gas welder using a wire hanger rod for the weld. I did brazing as a teen ager on a couple of my motor cycles.
we had an ornamental metal door consisting of artistic rods in our house in Texas. They were rusting and falling apart. I went out and bought an Oxi-Accetylene
welding set with the tank. I spent several afternoons replacing the rods and welding them into place. It was fun.

I'm not a professional fiberglass guy. Yet, I took out the fiberglassed wooden floor from my 23ft. console fishing boat in Texas. I cut and replaced all the flooring
on it and fiberglassed the top with 3 layers of fiberglass cloth. My Albuquerque upstairs balcony has a four foot wall around it with a 1 1/2 inch thick board by
12 inches wide that sit on top and runs 18 feet. The wood was become soft and rotted and there were places you could put knife into it and the rotten wood would
leave a hole. I thought about replacing that large board, but then I decided to fiberglass over it. I first slathered on fiberglass resin and let it sink into the rotten wood.I kept giving it a coat every hour until it was a smooth surface. I then put on two layers of fiberglass cloth and resin. It came out beautiful.

It's kinda fun learning new skills.

I decided to finish out my Junior and Senior university years by hopping in my 55 Ford and driving to Mexico City by myself and enrolling in Mexico City College.
I'm still in awe that my parents permitted this. I didn't speak a word of Spanish. Anyway, I graduated with a BA in Foreign trade and later got a Master's in Economic there.

Mexico City College was an affiliate of the Ivy League Brown University and many of my College mates were from dynastic and famous families from both the US and Mexico.
I had to learn to fit in really quick and lose my redneck yahoo persona. People like Phil Grace of the Grace Shipping lines, Bill Andrews whose father invented the process of imprinting on cans, George Sikorsky of the Helicopter company, Mike Bermudez whose dad was the head of the Organization of the American States(OAS) plus many more. The student body was so radically different than LSU and Northwestern State back in Louisiana, that I thought I had landed on an alien planet. Many of the students were from California and the North East. I had never been around people like that before.

Quite a few were younger CIA people who were sent there to give them an international perspective and to learn Spanish to later be placed somewhere in Latin America I stayed in a boarding house the first semester where there were two to a room and my roomate there was Thomas Tuling who was in the CIA and later became a pretty high figure in the agency and who later in my life proved to be a way for me to make some extra cash money which I won't go reveal.

Anyway, by going off to this college, I matured super fast and was introduced into another world and a way of being ,which I otherwise, would not have been if I would have finished my education in Louisiana. Learning Spanish fluently has added to the richness of my life in moving between the two cultures and enjoying the music, literature and the diversity of the Hispanic people consisting of 600 million people below our southern border.

It has been fun learning from traveling all over the world and meeting and conversing will all types of people. Actually walking over the islands in the S. Pacific where blood drained into the ocean from both the Japanese and Americans. One day I walked into the jungle in Saipan on a trail and set down on a fallen log. My imagination took off. I could smell the gun powder and blood and see bodies falling everywhere. I scuba dived in Truk and saw Japanese zeros resting on the bottom of the Truk lagoon with pilots still in their harness and flying gear. That was really spooky and still think about it often. I walked across the runway on Tinian Island where the Enola Gay took off with the atomic bomb. I've seen our landing craft rusting in 4 feet of water. I've seen the shells of our rusting tanks all over the S. Pacific islands. I climbed the mountains in Truk and saw Japanese gun emplacements. It looked like the Japs walked away from them the day before. I went on this odyssey in 1983 by myself for one month.

I've traveled to many places in the Orient. Drank a river in the Phillipines, Singapore and Hong Cong. Played blackjack in Macau, Monaco, France, Italy and England. Visited the New Territories in China.

I've been all over Europe visiting WW2 sites and Roman ruins. For me Spain is the most interesting due to the history of the Arabic interface with Europe where the
Muslims and Jews lived side by side in the most educated place in the world at that time. It was like Methodists and Presbyterians living side by side. Southern Spain had the highest standard of living in the world at that time until the Christian Crusaders under orders from Pope Urban came down and slaughtered them and started the Inquisition. The Arab mosques and Jewish temples are a sight to see in Spain. Magnificent architecture. There are a lot of Roman ruins in Spain also.

It has been fun learning to fly, riding a motorcycle all over the US, Canada and Alaska. I had three very close calls flying. I was flying around Lake Ponchartrain with Carmen in the right seat when she suddenly felt hot oil on her leg. Well an oil leak had occurred and I wheeled around and made it back to Lake front Airport in New Orleans before the engine siezed up.

Another time, a friend and I were flying his old C model Beechcraft back from Acapulco, we decided to land in Ciudad Victoria instead of Tampico to refill.
Ciudad Victoria is a little further. We had head winds and with the cheap Mexican fuel we flew on fumes with both guages reading empty for 10 minutes. We leaned the engines and slowly lost altitude. There was no way to set the plane down in these rugged mountains. We made it to the runway and as soon as we touched down the engines quit. We were shaking with fear for a half hour after that. What is strange is that not a single word was spoken between us for 15 minutes before we landed. We knew our situation and we thought we were going to die.

The 3rd time was we flew to Grande Isle from New Orleans to go scuba diving on the offshore rigs. We had four scuba tanks, weight belts, spear guns, etc in the back seat. It was an old under powered Cessna 170 A model tail dragger. After we dived we returned to the plane late afternoon. It was a dirt runway which was muddy and a short runway. There was a power line not to far from the end of the runway. It's was his plane and I was riding shotgun. I advised him to make a short field takeoff. ie give it 10 % flaps and power the engine up to redline while holding the brakes then letting it go. No he said, there's no need to. So off we went with no flaps. Well, the muddy runway has a lot of friction with the tires grooving in the mush. When we broke from the ground I readily calculated there was no way we were going to make it over that power line. I screamed at Jim and told him we can't make it. Well the dumb SOB said we could and kept going. At the last few seconds, I wasn't about to die with this guy who only had one eye and lacked depth perception. I yelled take your hands off your wheel and shoved my wheel in and nosed down and we went under the power line. I told him if I had not been a pilot you would have killed yourself and your passenger. Jim Arnsten was his name and he's passed on. He never had a pilot's license in his life as he couldn't pass a physical with just one eye. He flew for years in his old beat up plane. The moral to this story is never fly with an unlicensed one eyed pilot in an underpowered plane with a lot of weight in it and
taking off on a muddy dirt runway.

So I suppose I can be called a Renaissance man having done all kinds of repairs to broken things as well as making things better with my hands and reading and being curious about all things and having had the learning experiences of exploring this little globe with all it's differences. Plus exercising my rights and freedoms to run and get elected to public office when I disagreed with their politics. All citizens should have that experience in our democratic republic.

I continue to read and learn about any and all things as well as travel. I continue to be a bistro raconteur meeting and talking with people. It is amazing what you can
learn from people smarter than you in their field.

Just in the Jinja bar over the years, I've learned about laser weaponry, the development of drones for warfare which were developed here in Sandia Labs. I've learned about what goes into the building of a small jet plane called the Eclipse which is built in Albuqerque. I've learned about how Bill Gates was when the Physician owner of Microsoft here in Albuquerque hired him to be a salesman for Microsoft. (Contrary to belief, Bill Gates did not start Microsoft). I talked with one of Microsoft's first employees who wrote code with the Physician and Paul Allen.

I've learned a lot from physicians who frequent the Jinja bar. I've learned about the New Mexico geology from a couple of geologists who come in there. Just the other night I was talking with two high school head football coaches who told me that the damn players don't give a damn anymore about discipline and they talk back at you and being a high school coach is a thankless job and not as rewarding as it was just 20 years ago. In just 20 short years the youth culture has changed.

In Jinja, I have discussed Federal taxation with both a CPA and two IRS agents. I've always done my own taxes since I can remember. I have never ever paid for someone
to do my taxes as I know more about my tax status than any other person. I did my Schedule C business taxes the whole time I was in business and my personal taxes when I was an employee. There are certain things a third party tax prepayer might not be willing to do. I've always taken the very aggressive approach figuring I would just pay up if I was audited which I was only one time and had to come up with a few hundred dollars re writing off my automobile. They only got me for one year and I had done it for years and continued to do it after I was audited and never was audited again. ie write off 90% use of my car as a business deduction.

One of the best tax avoidence methods is to own a foreign business. I owned a small restaurant in San Jose, Costa Rica from 1987 to 1992. Naturally, it never made a profit. I wrote off all my airline tickets due to being there 10 days out of every month for five years. I wrote off my apartment rent there as well as other sundry items. I would do a separate Schedule C for the restaurant business and my insurance business and attach the two Schedule Cs to my 1040. The restaurant Schedule C always had a net loss and this would be deducted from my insurance business Schedule C. A heck of a good legal tax shelter. I was never audited by the IRS on this.

As for writing my thoughts down, I've probably improved over the years. Back in 1994, I came in second in the Texas Wide Writer's Contest under the category of Satire and Parody. I sent in two satires on the mythical Texas cowboy. I've written quite a few satires over the years , but never submitted any more to a writer's contest. I've written pages and pages of poetry, most of which I lost due to a computer hard drive crash some years ago. I now back up everything.

I've found that writing is a great mental exercise in that a person has to focus his thoughts and recollections in an organized manner. It requires a disciplined approach. My style of writing is straight forward without a lot of flowery excess words. I try to put myself in the reader's position when I write. I don't like to read anything with a lot of verbose unnecessary verbiage where the writer seems to want to make you read forever before they get to the point.

As to the point of what I've written above, it's about attempting to be a "Man for All Seasons." A renaissance man. A man who is well traveled, knows a lot about a lot, but not in great depth, but more than superficial and who has a lot of curiosity about all things under the sun and who has an insatiable desire to continue learning from books, internet, other people and travel.

And in the end, it's not the years in your life that count - it's the life in your years.

I'm thankful that I have stuffed a lot of life's content into my years and will continue to do so.

Bob