Sometime last night, I think it was around eight PM, I was speaking to my wife , answering a question she asked: how many miles do you think you traveled while in the Navy? Blank stare. I simply said, “More than five miles.” How does one answer a question like that? As is typical of me, I morphed that into: “How many steps have I taken since I was born?” Have you kept track of how many steps you’ve taken? If you say, yes, I am not going to believe you. Even if you make a wild guess I will throw it out even before you throw it out.
One has to guess but even a guess is a fruitless gesture. Nobody knows how many steps a person has taken. More than one hundred is merely an admission of the brick wall in one’s mind a person comes up against. A person would have to keep a notebook immediately after the first step because entering into some computer program would not be done until at least seven years old. A guy like me on a ship like the one I was on has to guess hundreds of thousands of miles because we sailed from the U.S. West Coast to Vietnam, Japan, Taiwan, Australia, New Zealand, Russia, and Hawaii – Pago Pago and points in the Antarctic Ocean. I didn’t mention China as we weren’t supposed to be in Chinese waters but we were.
Next time your wife or husband asks how many steps or miles you’ve traveled just say, “It’s classified.”
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