The temperature is 1 degree. Okay, better than yesterday at this time when it was -20. Not exactly the kind of weather I want to go out in while trying to recover from a wicked case of the flu, but none the less, I will. I have obligations. So, I don my warmest sweater, wrap my knitted scarf around my neck, zip up my coat and head out to go do inspections. As I'm driving across town my dayquill infused brain starts to wander and I start to think about my dad. He worked for the City of Idaho Falls Electric Division for 35 years. I'm not really sure how he got started in electrical work because he was a radioman in the Navy, but all the same, he did. I do remember him telling how he started at the bottom, I swear he said he was digging ditches, and he worked his way up. Back then you could do that, being able to work hard mattered. One day he was a power plant operator and he took his wife and family to live on an island in the middle of the snake river where the hydroelectric plant was located. Most of the children grew up there. My sister, Kay, met her wonderful husband because they lived there. I never called the island home, because by the time I was born, Dad had built a house in Iona and that was where I would call home. For years a white truck with the City of Idaho Falls emblem on the doors was parked outside that house. That truck was a part of my life growing up. I was proud of my Dad and the fact that he worked for the City of Idaho Falls. He started at the bottom and ended up retiring as the supervisor of the distribution and generation department in the electrical division. I remember one terrible winter when Dad took me to school in that truck. I sat there on the seat beside him as we drove through a tunnel of snow so high you couldn't see over the top of it. When the Teton Dam broke, Dad got in that truck and drove to town to protect the turbins from the flood waters, and we didn't see him for two days. I don't think my Dad really planned to be an electrician, but destiny took him there and it gave him a good life. I didn't plan to be an electrician either. It was my Dad's life and I knew alot about it, but it really wasn't my dream. You want to hear a secret? I wanted to be a marine biologist. It was all I ever thought about all through school. It was my dream. But, instead, I decided to get married at 18 and have a half dozen kids. During that life, destiny set me on the path to becoming an electrician and I followed that path wholeheartedly and embraced it. Would I have had those half dozen kids if I had been a marine biologist? No one can say for sure. But, I can say for sure that those half dozen kids and becoming an electrician were two of the most valuable things destiny gave to me. My life has been fundamentally better because of those two things. I believe very strongly that marriage is a forever commitment. For 25 years it was for me, then one day it was broken and couldn't be fixed. The first day after it ended I walked in to Home Depot as an employee instead of a customer and it was because of destiny's path that I got that job. Without my electrical license, it never would have happened. On that day I met Jay Shaw. He had been there for months, but as a married customer, I had never met him. Now, as a single employee I did. Six weeks later we went on our first date. He was talking to me and I was looking at his eyes and destiny told me to take his hands, and without hesitation I reached across the table and took hold of his hands. My heart leaped inside my chest and my skin erupted with goosebumps as an electrical buzz shot up my spine, and I realized I knew him. I had always known him and he was my destiny. Six weeks later I married this man who I had never met until three months before. I didn't know his family, I knew nothing about his past or his childhood. It didn't matter. That was all another life. A life that destiny had used to lead us to this one. The one we were supposed to live. We came home to Iona and built our life here. Destiny chose my career path and it was that path that brought all the most wonderful things to my life. So here I am, driving around town in that white truck with the City of Idaho Falls emblem on the doors. I am with the companion I was destined to be with forever. I have a half dozen wonderful children who help me whenever I need them and give me grandchildren to adore. I am home in Iona where I grew up, and it was the path and career that was thrust upon me, not the one I would have chosen, that brought me here. Inside the cab of that City of Idaho Falls truck, I can feel my Dad sitting beside me. I feel a warm glow inside and I smile. "Hey Dad. Look at me."
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