Treasure Hunting

It could be old age or the memories piled up inside my head that draw me back to my first office/cave in the basement. It’s like a treasure chest of flashbacks that seems to happen whenever I return to my past life down there. While it’s not derelict real estate yet, the home of Sharden Productions, Inc. and various real estate ventures has long since lost its strategic placement in my daily life.

This nest of all things me was created many years ago when the children were finally settled into their beds each night, Sharon was working on office material upstairs and family life for both of us was busy, busy, busy. We had recently moved back from Maryland and comfortably ensconced in our new home in Apple Valley, Minnesota.

This man cave of sorts is where I escaped every night to focus my attention on my other life outside of public television. It was, at once, bill-paying central, dealing with landlord and apartment management issues, tenant concerns, reading to escape, writing to explore, and trying to stay on top of life in general.

Now that both Sharon and I have entered our ‘it’s time to purge a lifetime of collecting’ phase, I find myself returning, once again, to that basement treasure chest of memories; good, bad, remembered and long-since forgotten. Most of the treasures can be found in the books and magazines collected over the last forty plus years. A slow meandering perusal keeps tripping old memories long locked in that vast vacuum called ‘the past.’

This return journey to wonderful storytelling began with 1950’s male tabloids, Jack Kerouac travel tales, bicycling and running books, biographies, and a lot of reference material for past novels written. The dust and desert heat of the old West was never far away. Each book pulled me back to another time and place in my life. They were all good, often complicated treasures, soon forgotten in the encapsulating rush of daily life.

Rereading some of that collection has been a real joy all over again. It started with ‘Wanderer’ by Sterling Hayden then moved on to ‘I See by My Outfit’ by Peter Beagle. ‘The Fume of Poppies’ was one of the first novels that explored young love with all of its complexities and sad outcomes.

The list goes on and on. Adventure novels like ‘South by Java Head’ and ‘HMS Ulysses’. Self-maintenance ‘Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance’ and ‘A Yaqui Way of Knowledge’ by Carlos Castaneda. Religious reflections by Malcolm Boyd with his ‘Are You Running with Me, Jesus?’ and poetry by Leonard Cohen among others.

Since I was in the television/video production business, my shelves held years of past productions. Work tapes, scratch tapes and all forms of analog reference material played prominently during that period. Movies on DVD and VHS played a prominent role in entertainment back then.

My enthusiasm for N-Scale model railroading never proceeded beyond collecting lots of magazines and building a ton of scratch-built homes, buildings, trestles, and other assorted railroad structures. In one corner of my desk over 700 of my blogs are now captured in hardbound books for future readers?

Next to my office in the laundry room, I’ve carved out a corner with an old Dell PC used primarily for scanning photos, etc. to digital images and scratching out writing ideas. The purging continues with old files, analog material, and collected mementoes; most of them heading for the waste paper basket.

So, whenever I can carve out some evenings, the treasure hunting continues, the memories keep spilling out and time marches on. It was the best of times and it’s always fun to stumble across some mementos of those periods in my past life.

Life is good.