Back Step in Time

For many years I considered mind games such as ‘what if…’ and ‘but if not for…’ to be exercises in futility. They were simply excuses to ponder ones history and guess what might have happened back then. It was nothing more than living in the past. I don’t intend to recount my ‘glory days’ until there are no more mountains to conquer and no more seas to cross.

Now a couple of recent conversations have changed my perspective on the matter.

In his book ‘Self Matters’ Dr. Phil McGraw, Ph.D. (Yeah, I know, Dr. Phil) suggests the reader identify ten defining moments in their lives and seven critical choices they’ve made. The number I assume is arbitrary. The point is that each one of us has made critical choices in our past lives and whether we knew it or not at the time it changed the direction of our lives dramatically.

Cretin High School - Photo Credit Jerry Hoffman

I’d already gone through that exercise many years ago and it proved to be enormously eye-opening.  There were a number of events in my younger years that propelled me into what and where I am today. Those were life-altering events such as being accepted into Cretin High School, returning to the College of Saint Thomas, living abroad, getting married, starting my own business, my investments and even getting fired once. Each event helped shape the person I evolved into. Along with those events were life experiences and relationships that could have gone either way.

After reminiscing with a couple of old friends about our respective lives I was forced to turn my attention to those people, events and actions of mine that might have gone in another direction. Despite past prejudices against ruminating through my past I found myself drawn to some old pictures. At that point my over-active imagination ran rampant with repetitive thoughts about what if…

The dye was cast and the mold begun. I was scheduled to go to Monroe High School at first until a last minute cancellation got me into Cretin. Monroe was a good school but it wouldn’t have been the same.

She was the first one. Emotions I’d never experienced before. Yet it withered and died like most high school romances.

An atypical college romance interrupted by two years of military service and a strong desire on her part to head out east. She went to Boston. I moved to Denmark.

Maria was my translator and confidant at the Danish laundry where I worked. She was married but a great friend. She wanted me to stay on but wanderlust pulled me away.

Her name was Heidi. She was a college student in Denmark. I met her when she worked briefly at the laundry before returning to campus. She wanted me to stay with her on the coast where she was in college. I deferred to better judgement. We lost touch with one another after I left for the south of France.

A Dutch potter and a painter. They were the best of friends and accepted me into their ragtag eclectic band of brothers. It was 1968 in Amsterdam and things were wild. They promised to get me a job and even had an apartment lined up that I could share with some of their friends. I had a job waiting for me back home but little else. It was very tempting. 

Neighborhood I almost moved to in Amsterdam

More of the neighborhood that didn't become mine

Amsterdam Nightclub 1968

Tram I would have taken to work in Amsterdam

Travel Agency where I would have worked in Amsterdam

Dam Square - site of a lot of anti-war demonstrations in the 1960s

In the end I declined their offer and returned home. We wrote for a little while then I / we moved on with our lives. A great group of folks.

We started writing to one another as pen pals.  I visited her in England once and she came to Ohio but we never hooked up…here or there. She was bright, fun and fascinated with the states. I think she wanted to be a librarian or a school teacher. I hope her wish came true.

Sharon - The power behind the rocking chair

Mix an ISTJ (off the charts) with an ENFJ (off the charts) and what do you get besides an affirmation that opposites attract. It worked for me. There were life twists and turns every step of the way. Even marriage and kids didn’t slow the evolution of our lives.

Now I pound the keyboard every day and wonder how I got here in the first place. It could have been Copenhagen or Amsterdam or Tennessee or Baltimore. Instead it’s a quiet street in Apple Valley, Minnesota and a mountain view out west.

Who knew?

My Bootleg Years

Living in Amsterdam. 1970

Bootleg: an illegal copy of a video, CD, etc., or an illegal recording of a live performance.

Perhaps that’s what I’m trying to do. Understand those past experiences that defined my life…up until this point. It would seem I’ve entered my bootleg years.

In my lost years, I examined and reflected upon that period between high school graduation on May 3^rd, 1961 and my marriage on May 31^st, 1971. But further reflection of those ten years has left me with a parcel of unanswered questions. It’s much like discovering Ancestry.com and hidden family tracks buried beneath the sands of time. There seem to be a multitude of clues waiting to be unearthed and examined.

Living in Denmark.  1967

Visiting Apple Records.  London 1970

But as interesting as rehashing the past might be, a larger question remains. What do

those past experiences have to do with my present life? What do the tumultuous changes and excitement of the 60’s have to do with my present state of mind? And more importantly, why does it seem to matter so much to me now?

I’ve come to realize and appreciate that those were my bootleg years. Unbeknownst to me I was absorbing, collecting, inhaling and assimilating many of the thoughts and icons, values and virtues, assumptions and goals, ideas and ideals of that period. It became my cloak of many colors that I ended up wearing throughout my life.

But why reflect back on that period now?

My Cretin Classmates.  2011

For one thing, people are dying all around me. Classmates have left our classroom of life. Neighbors have gotten old and frail then disappeared into that large brick building downtown. Others in the prime of their life have suddenly gotten the big C.

But more than the threat of the grim reaper haunting my doorstep is the stark fact that I can’t redo what’s been done…even if I wanted to. I can’t start over again…in most things. I’ve passed through multiple stages in my life.

So how did those ten years mold me into the person I am today? And as importantly, can I allow my head to wander the clouds and still keep my feet firmly planted on the ground as I begun this collective retrospective of my time on earth? Can I do this introspection of mine without bias, apologies or regrets?

Exploring one’s past is like scratching poetry on the beach before the waves of time obliterate those thoughts and ideas. I want to peel back the truth as I know it because it is organic and free of vice. It is pure.

I also refuse to play the mind game: ‘But if not for’…

Our Family 2015

This is it then. It’s all here in this cornucopia of lives and people, places and things that I have lived and experienced, loved and lost, found and lost again, gained and lost again, failed and succeeded.

Now almost organically I am harvesting that lifetime of memories. A plethora of experiences and past moments that offer a brief glimpse into a life lost in the fog of time and a fading memory.

It’s a glimpse at my own legacy and others who have passed before me.

It’s future dates I won’t see.

And who will read my eulogy.

A Catholic Education

St. Louis Grade School - St. Paul, MN

My mother was a devout Catholic so I had little choice in the matter of my education.  Back in the early fifties my sister and I attended St. Louis Grade School in downtown Saint Paul, Minnesota. The old relic has long since been torn down but the memories linger in black and white. Attending school there meant a half hour ride to and from downtown for eight years. First by streetcar with their woven mesh seats and no heat (anyone remember those?) then by city bus.

The nuns were strict and mean and very old school. But their approach to education worked and I got educated. Unlike some of my unruly classmates I never got smacked across the head or hit with a ruler. Although once in second grade I got busted after sneaking peeks at my Daniel Boone comic book hidden in my desk drawer. The imposing rotund nun made me stand in front of the entire class and throw it into the wastepaper basket. That hurt!

I’ve always assumed my mother got a discount from the nuns because she certainly couldn’t have afforded full tuition on her meager restaurant salary. I’ll give the nuns that. They did have compassion for a single parent with two urchin’s under tow. There was the free lunch at noon and at times donated clothing that could be picked over after class. Those nuns were tough but classy. It was the Catholic way.

Cretin High School Scrapbook Page

Cretin High School cost four hundred dollars a year paid for out of my paper route plus odd jobs during the summer. Cretin was an ROTC school run by strict Christian Brothers with their no-nonsense approach to life and education. At our fiftieth anniversary we alumni compared jobs and lives; subtly of course. Seems like that educational approach worked pretty well for my comrades and I in our careers as well as in life.

Graduation on May 31^st, 1961 was the launch of my ‘lost years’ although I didn’t know it at the time. It was the beginning of ten years wandering through the wilderness of a young life spiked with bouts of education and life-altering experiences. Back in the sixth grade my belief in Catholicism had been badly wounded by the Baltimore Catechism. Now all those simmering doubts and questions grew in intensity as I experienced real life on yet another level.

For some reason this photo of the quadrangle on the campus of the College of St. Thomas says it all. It’s the winter of 1961 and I’m freezing my ass off cutting across campus. What I remember most of that period were the blustery winter winds sweeping across campus and right through my light jacket. My most poignant college memories don’t cluster around classes or the cafeteria or my girlfriend at the time. It wasn’t the work after school or the hard studying just to keep my grades afloat. Instead it was the bone-rattling cold that nipped at my fingertips and bit into my ear lobes. Funny how some school memories can do that; lose the true essence of the collegiate experience amid the discomfort of a bitterly cold winter’s day.

But St. Thomas never was a smooth fluid experience for me. Instead it morphed into two separate life journeys distracted with interruptions from the University of Minnesota and the U.S. Army. By then Catholicism wasn’t even on my radar any more.

 

The Presidio of San Francisco opened up a whole new world for me. It released possibilities and dreams after my educational collapse at the U of M. The Army proven to be a macho world where I explored life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness all the while trailing other lost souls as I stumbled forth. For two years it carried me around the country and across the border. Then it dumped me back into the welcoming arms of Saint Thomas after an early release.

College of St. Thomas Yearbook Staff

Thanks to the G.I. Bill there was less stress to find work and more time to write for the school yearbook. I had a nest in my basement at home where I could sequester myself and focus on learning to learn. I got two things from that experience; a college education and ‘Love in the A Shau.’ Not a bad ROI for two thousand dollars per college year.

Denmark made me a stranger in a strange land. There were new attitudes toward life and love and self. Religion continued to be this strange ritualistic practice performed by my mother but rejected by my colleagues and me.

After Europe (Snow White and the SevenSeekers) this ex-pat came home and found a dump

to live in and a Sunday sanctuary full of song and fellowship. The Newman Center for Catholic Studies had gone all hippie and folk-like with its mass, its litany and communal singing. It was a haven of peace and friendship and sharing. It hinted of something wonderful but we never labeled it Catholic…just community.

 

Susan was there with me to share that skeletal existence, career explorations, the Triangle Bar and the poetry readings. She was just another road warrior searching for her future as I was searching for mine. We were like two literary hobos riding the rails of life’s jumbled journey but steeled by our dogged determination to succeed. She was like an elixir for my mind on Saturday nights and for my soul on Sunday mornings.

           

‘Suzanne’ was our national anthem, our rallying cry and our homage to the visceral pictures painted in our minds. It was Sunday morning sunshine after the thought-provoking Saturday night salon of the Triangle Bar. Leonard Cohen was our hero and our pied-piper even as the church dared label him our Svengali.

A lot of my life history was left back there. I’ve tried to capture the essence of that period with Love in the A Shau and blogs like Looking for Susan’s House and I found Susan’s House among others.

Back then, I was still wading through the flotsam of those early religious years. The Newman Center showed me another side of Christianity. It was love and compassion and caring. It was exploring one’s mind as well as one’s soul. It was questioning and challenging and accepting. It was finding comfort in who we were and the strength to believe we could be more.  

Then it was all gone. I moved on. Susan moved on. Life carried us both away.

Now years later I’m trying to fashion stories out of those mixed religious experiences. I have wrapped myself in a coat of many colors and tried to decipher the coded messages from the real ones. What truth, if any, was to be found in the Baltimore Catechism? Were there really mess-ages in all those rambling, repetitive boring eulogies on Sunday morning? Is there a commonality among religions despite repeated claims that each is the only one? I wander through this religious wilderness seeking the truth that, in fact, lies only within me. So I let my mind dance across the keyboard and stories come to life.

‘Cafeteria Catholic’ is a play which examines the relationship of an agnostic who finds himself attracted to a devote Catholic. It’s a paradox I find intriguing enough to write a play about it.

‘Frenchy’s Eats’ is a play which examines the dysfunctional and yet poetic relationship between

a man and a woman, an intrusive Catholic church and a father the author never knew. It’s a complicated play in its rag-tag juxtaposition of elements and explanations that danced between my parents, their divorce and the mysterious Canadian legacy that still lurks far back in my own ancestry.

‘Love in the A Shau’ is a trip back in time when a young man was struggling to stay afloat in an Ivy-league world he never knew existed, the tantalizing taste of first love and class differences that he let define him.

My blogs often wander back through that period to rummage and rifle through old memories; both good and bad. I suppose they’re really memoirs of a sort in case a future generation cares to examine their grandfather’s life lived back then.

Because of my Catholic education I learned the intrinsic value of working hard, helping others, being fair and trying to be a good man, a good husband, a good father and grandfather.

Despite my Catholic education I learned the value of self.

Truth be told, I’m a Christian before I’m a Catholic. But I could just as easily be a Buddhist, a Muslim or a Jew. I’m not a religious person but I believe in religion; whatever flavor people may chose. It’s not a bad combination; a double-edged sword to combat the challenges of life while accepting responsibility for what comes our way.

Perhaps way back then those wise women dressed in their penguin attire did teach me something about religion after all. It’s been a long journey.

Guess I’ve circled back now to where it all started.