Autobiography - The Galindo Group

Ram Galindo THE MAKING OF AN AMERICAN Page 195
atmosphere feels as a different world also. Land based humans can be guests in the
realm of birds when they dare to skydive, but only for the briefest of times.
Once my parachute opened successfully the fear of death disappeared and the
enjoyment of a new experience began. A controlled float under the safety of a welldeployed
parachute is totally enjoyable. For a beginner, it is the reward for sport
skydiving. I was lucky to steer to my target area and touch down without a hitch. I
survived to try again the following week, and then almost every week for a couple of
months. I must admit though that the first few return jumps were designed more to gain
control of my fear than to become a proficient skydiver. Jumping out of a perfectly good
plane is indeed a test for the spirit, for self-confidence and for control of our reactions
under life risking circumstances.
However, sometimes the randomness of the world we live in transcends even our most
determined efforts. Seven years after I started my skydiving experience I treated my
wife Susan to a tandem parachute jump as her fortieth birthday gift. Her jump was a
memorable success and she had a lot of fun. Tragically, less than a month after her
jump, a plane crash took the life of the pilot who had flown us as well as four other
jumpers and instructors, including the owner of the business. It was a bereaving
experience that closed down the Bryan parachute jumping operation until very recently.
While I list some examples of what I consider to have been adventurous passages of
my life, I am not certain that my brother Chris had it wrong when he told my mother that
I was an adventurer in all I did. Perhaps my adventures started when as a growing boy
in the rough valleys of Cochabamba I heard a silent call that only a few could hear. It
was the call of America. I didn’t understand why, but I knew I would someday answer it.
Much later I realized that the call was so irresistible because it spoke of freedom, of selfreliance,
of personal responsibility, of the challenge to be all that one can be, of equal
opportunity, of fair competition, of private initiative, of the right to keep what one
produces, of dignifying compassion and of the obligation to keep the system from
corruption and decay.
Throughout this book I make references to the proper seeding grounds for a person to
prosper. I think I was, indeed my whole family was, good seeding grounds to respond to
the call of America. The traits that we brought with us in response to that call had been
embedded in our genome, in our values and in our choices for as far back as I can trace
my ancestry. They came to me by inheritance, either biological or taught at home. They
are, indeed, a reinforcing addition to the lifeblood of our country. To the best of my
knowledge my ancestors’ determination to seek, in their own period-defined way, some
of the propositions at the base of the American Concept goes back to the Pyrenees of
Northern Spain almost 14 centuries ago.
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