JIM “PAPPY” MOORE: The Best Laid Plans of Mice & Men Often Go Awry

The phrase first appeared in a poem from Scottish poet and writer Robert Burns in “To a Mouse.” Writing in the late 1700s, Burns would die at 37 but left his indelible mark on Scottish and English literature. My 12th grade English teacher would surely dance a jig to know that 58 years after she sang his praises I would write this piece about him.

In the 20th century America’s own John Steinbeck would write his famous book “Of Mice and Men,” the title foreshadowing the events where the best laid plans of men went awry. My teacher would have been proud to know that I went on to read with great joy Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, and his epic Depression Era book Grapes of Wrath, both on my own after I graduated high school and just before I joined the military. My quest for knowledge and literature was never confined to a class or an instructor.

How often we make plans only to see them go awry. When I was twenty-one I was a Staff Sergeant in the Air Force. I loved my work. It paid well. There was a very huge re-enlistment bonus waiting for me if I took that option. It was my plan to re-enlist and to get the USAF to send me to college under the Airman’s Education and Completion Program, and upon graduating I would enter Officer Candidate School to become an officer. It was a great plan. The base commander had recruited me for that future. He loved the way I wrote reports about events which required his attention at the Command Post.

Then I got a call from “the world,” as we referred to back home in the United States. It was through the Red Cross. My father was gravely ill with cancer and it was imperative that I get back home to see him before he passed away. I had been gone for 19 months. Three days later I was back home, hugging my Dad in the front yard. He was 44. I was 21. He looked healthy. Five weeks later we would bury him.

His death changed everything. My mother was 42. She had two girls still at home. My getting out of the military and going back home seemed imperative, and that is what I chose to do. No more Air Force. No more Staff Sergeant Moore. No more AECP program. I went home. I got a job. I went to college full time, too, working toward that degree with double majors of History and Political Science. Two years later I would graduate with honors.

From there I went directly into law school at the University of Texas School of Law, then a Top Ten Law School in the nation. I graduated 33 months later with high praise from the Dean of the Law School.

It has now been almost 50 years since I completed law school. The entire direction of my life changed in a single phone call that beckoned me to return home immediately. The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry.

So I had to make a new plan, and that plan has chugged along. I did not anticipate that thirty-five years ago, in 1990, I would get the urge to write, and thus began the writing career I have had stretching through the 1990s, 2000s, 2010s, and 2020s. Well over a thousand pieces published. Poetry, Cartoons, and Editorial pieces. I write what I have to say. I hope others will like it, but that is not my goal. I have to like it. That is my goal.

I’m not done yet.