Free Phoenix Fire by Billy Chitwood

you that I'm sharing these observations?”
    “No, it doesn't bother me at all. I'm in no way offended.” She snickered. “Guess it makes me feel a tad silly, though.”
    “You're not silly at all. You're honest and true to your feelings, and you don't mind sharing them. You're strong and confident in your words and actions. That's enviable. You have a soul, Jenny Anne. Some people don't know how to find their souls, too busy seeing life in black and white terms, too incapable of coming to terms with thoughts that seem alien to them. Some people are too busy acting out their little deceptions, too busy contriving instead of striving. You are, in short, a remarkable woman. There, I've had my say. Hope it didn't sound too arrogant, didactic, and/or pedantic.”
    Jenny looked at the strong, pleasantly assured profile of the man with whom she was falling in love. With little effort she could cry tears of joy, but she would not. So many emotions stirred within her. Finally, she could only mutter a weak retort: “Takes one to know one.”
    They looked at each other for some seconds. Jason put his right hand over her left upturned palm, squeezed gently, and smiled a warm and silent response. He then returned to the business of driving.
    They were quiet for a protracted period of time, each lost in the motor hum, the tires whine, and the vast desert all around them. Their silence was not an uncomfortable thing.
    Jenny spoke first. “Have we been doing some metaphysical, philosophical meandering here? It seems to me we got pretty deep.” She snickered.
    “Suppose we did, in some very general way. Why do you ask?”
    “Hmm, I don't know. Guess I just have a lot of questions crowding my mind.”
    “Questions? Like, what?”
    “Well, like, what gives you pleasure in life, Jason? What is it you want from life?”
    “Oh, I suppose the first question is the easiest to answer, sort of. What gives me pleasure in life? Well, I'm a lucky guy because my work gives me a lot of pleasure. Maybe you'll get a hint of that today. Many people can't say they get pleasure from their work. Lots of studies show that there are people stuck in jobs they hate, just marking time day in, day out. Had a man tell me once that he worked in a sub-assembly division of a major aircraft plant, stamping numbers on wires, clustering those wires, small and large, and soldering them into receptacles of one size or another. The whole process was so boring he lived for the fifteen-minute coffee breaks and the thirty-minute lunch breaks, dying little by little in between. The stamping process and the soldering joints needed to conform ever so precisely to specifications, and many times they did not conform. The man said the quality control people often times approved the receptacles without carefully, thoroughly checking the soldering joints.
    “Now, that scared me when he told me about the shoddy inspections. Those receptacles go into passenger jets that people use for cross-country travel. If we have people working on critical parts of an airplane with such boredom and nonchalance, you have to wonder if that behavior ultimately results in major crashes.
    “But just imagine the thousands, tens of thousands, of people who have jobs they hate, bored out of their minds. For one reason or another, they are stuck in those jobs. The pay is good. It's the only job they know. They have no ambition or aptitude for anything else. So many people never find out in life what it is they really want to do. Imagine, mired for years, a lifetime, in an endless string of hours hating what you're doing.
    “Me? I'm a lucky man, a fortunate man. Sure, I was born into privilege, never really wanted for much. When my parents were killed by a truck driver asleep at the wheel, I felt lost for a while, cheated, depressed, lots of anxiety, whatever. But Grandma Myrena and Grandpa John took up the slack and were always there for me. They pointed me toward my work of choice with careful