ABSTRACT
After spending many years with an airline there eventually came a time when I began to attend more and more retirement parties. Quite often some type of plaque was presented honoring the pilot retiring during the celebration, along with many good wishes for pleasant years ahead. Usually each plaque contained some very personal words, words that expressed gratitude for the years of service along with the date of hire and the date of retirement separated by a dash. Although I was always conscious of these facts, I really began to focus on their significance following an E-mail I received from an old Navy friend. Reading the message, I became fascinated by a story he related of a certain fellow visiting a cemetery and viewing the dates on the gravestones. Listening to my friend’s story, he said that the fellow visiting the cemetery began to ponder that the real story behind a grave marker was the dash between the dates rather than the two dates it divided. What my friend was pointing out was that the dash on the gravestones represented more than just the separation of dates. To him the dash represented the worth of the individual’s whole life. He felt it was certainly more important than the two dates that signified the length of the person’s life. For me it was easy to make the analogy between that story and that of a pilot’s career. More important than the date of hire and the date of retirement is whether or not the years in between were meaningful. As we might reflect on the quality of a person’s life in the story above, so might we reflect on a pilot’s career when we think about the time between the date of hire and the date of retirement?
