A Welcoming Hand

Thanksgiving and Easter can often be orphan holidays in my neck of the woods. Most of us expect to be home or at least with family at Christmas and maybe over New Years. But often Thanksgiving and Easter find families far apart perhaps because of time and distance.

The LaComb family entourage spends time in Palm Springs around either Thanksgiving or during the Christmas holidays depending on their own individual family obligations. When the whole gang is around for Thanksgiving like last year it’s a whirlwind of family activities, assorted adventures, and very little quiet time. But when they’re not here it’s an entirely different story. It’s still a family gathering but of a different nature.

It isn’t the holiday per say that makes the day different. The drinks and ordure’s ahead of time are the same. The meal, and often, the games we often play afterwards, remain the same. It turns out that Thanksgiving and Easter are no different here than Christmas or New Year’s Eve back in Minnesota. It’s still a wonderful gathering of like-minded friends and acquaintances. They’re just not immediate family.

It’s become a long-standing tradition for Sharon and I. One might say it was born out of Mother Hen’s need to entertain and the joy it brings to others who don’t have a place to call home on that special day. It’s what we do when regular family members aren’t around.

Perhaps, it’s like the lost generation in Paris who gathered for comfort, companionship, and mental stimulation. It’s like a folk gathering in Greenwich Village or a poet’s corner in North Beach. It’s a modern-day version of the Triangle Bar on Saturday night. We’re all ex-pats from different parts of the country brought here for a variety of reasons and simply trying to spend quality time with like-minded souls. Singles or couples are often a part of that equation.

More often than not, someone will know somebody or a couple here in town that doesn’t have a place to go for Thanksgiving or Easter. They then become a part of our extended family for the day. Familiarity is formed over good conversation, great food and genuine warmth and appreciation for the presence of others.

That’s when Palm Spring’s own version of Martha Stewart west gets to dress her table with relish…literally. There’s Rosenthal China, Waterford Crystal, antique silver settings, antique salt cellars, individual silver butter knives and place cards with crystal bowls. Sharon likes to say presentation sets the mood. It’s light and festive and warm and welcoming.

And for that brief afternoon, we’re all gathered among friends or newly-made acquaintances sharing a bountiful meal and enjoying one another’s company.

And when the day ends and we’re all disperse back to our regular lives, we’ve been enriched by that shared experience and the joy of giving.

I recently found out that young people nowadays have a new name for Thanksgiving. They’re calling it ‘Friendsgiving.’ I like that. It’s a fitting description of what we do here in the desert.

Scenes From My Life

I was recently commiserating with one of my salon buddies about old friends and past acquaintances who have traveled through our lives at one point or another. With many collective miles under our belts, my friend and I have both had many casual, some close and a few memorable connections over the years.

While some of my friends won’t admit it, I do know a number of them who have acquiesced to ‘Facebook stalking’ and/or perusing ‘Classmates.com’ in hopes of finding old school chums, friends, associates, love interests and other assorted contacts made over the years. I find myself fascinated with the age-old question of ‘whatever happened to…’

Some great philosopher once said that you leave something of yourself with everyone you come into contact with. Granted, you are a different person now than you were back then but if you have ‘history’ with that person even for a brief period of time, the connection can still be there even years later.

The categories where old acquaintances can be found are too numerous to be listed here. It really comes down to meaningful events in your life if for only short periods of time. They’re like brief scenes from the storybook of your life.

photo courtesy of Jerry Hoffman

One of my biggest regrets is that almost all of those kids I hung around with through my grade school years have long since scattered to the winds of time. It would have been so fascinating to find out how their lives turned out after life growing up in Highland Park.

I didn’t reconnect with any of my Cretin High School classmates until well after our 50th Class reunion. Back in school, I had a small cadre of friends; all of whom were on the college track in school. Then there was me; preordained to go into the trades or the service. A few of us reconnected after the reunion and continue meeting occasionally to this day.

The Army had a profound effect on me although I didn’t realize it at the time. My two-year enlistment was ripe with hundreds of storylines, personal antidotes and character studies. Events happened and were forgotten only to resurface years later when nudged forward by a song, comment or photograph. It was a colorful kaleidoscope of military images buried deep in my memory bank. It was only a ‘moment in time’ but there were enough instances of brain-burn that I still can’t shake them. Over time, some of those images have become characters in my plays, novellas, and novels.

Living in Europe on two separate occasions also supplied me with lasting memories of colorful characters, sad creatures, and intimate cerebral partners for late night salons.

There was my old roommate I called ‘animal,’ who only lived with me briefly but even then, left a memorable impression. Tiny Bailey, another lost soul from Arizona, escaped an alcoholic mother to seek solace in Denmark but ended up leaving for Israel instead. There was the guy from Canada who lived with a local family and was treated like royalty and Maria, my pal at the Danish laundry. There were a few even closer contacts that never went very far. For some that was a good thing. For others, I wish I was still in touch.

KTCA television was still evolving and changing from educational television to public television when I began volunteering there on the crew. I was the oldest among the gang but we had one hell of a time taping television programs and learning the trade.

In the eighties, I went on a film shoot to Costa Rica that lasted almost a month. My fellow travelers and I endured three weeks of heat and humidity and deadly tree-hugging snakes. They were a crazy bunch of writers, photo journalists, and adventurers. Any day now, I expect to see one or more of them on some National Geographic Special.

Where there is history, there are memories. The key here is to glance at the past but not to linger there. I think it’s human nature to want to know about past acquaintances no matter how close or vapid they might have been. They were all, in a way, a reflection of who you were at that point in your life. A point in time that can’t be returned, replaced, or replicated.

But can still hold some poignant memories nevertheless. ‘Happy Trails’ to all of them.

Sins of Omission

When you think about the things you will regret when you’re 80 or 90 or 100, it’s probably the things that you didn’t do. They’re your sins of omission. Very rarely do we regret something we tried but failed at. It’s those actions, connections, statements, or gestures that we should have made - but didn’t - which will haunt us as we’re making our final tabulation of time spent here on earth.

When we were all young and dumb, the world was a rainbow landscape full of wonderful adventures and opportunities. Each of us set out to become whatever we thought we should be…at the time. The world was our oyster and we meant to have it all.

It’s funny how reality evolves and our past lives and aspirations finally catch up with us. That winding road called ‘life’ is either running smooth as asphalt or rough like gravel. And yet none of us want to get off the road even if the ride isn’t what we expected it to be after all these years.

It’s been fifty-four years since I turned twenty-one and shed my cloak of anonymity to adorn myself with the costume of adulthood. Now many of us are at a point in our lives where reflection is more than a glass of chardonnay framed within a sunset or a cold brew among high school buddies.

Our current life style is an accumulation of habits born long before our birth. For some of us it was modeled after our parent’s pioneering excursion into life. For others, it was a process of discovery, loss, acceptance and rejection. And finally our life style became us on a daily basis and we weren’t even aware of it. It’s only now that the accumulation of excess and/or scarcity raises its hidden head.

I had a quote given to me by the President of the Maryland Center for Public Broadcasting back in the early 70s.  It’s guided me for many years in how to live my life. The quote goes:

‘The worst thing one can do is not to try, to be aware of what one wants and not to give in to it, to spend years in silent hurt wondering if something could have materialized – and never knowing.’

Ernest Hemingway is quoted as saying that life is like a bank account. How you use it is solely your determination. You can withdraw it in a hurry and live a very short life. Or you can be diligent with your withdrawals and live, hopefully, much longer.

We can always try to rectify some of our mistakes or enhance our positive steps but age and reticence to change are usually huge obstacles to overcome. We’ve let life’s ebb and flow (our gypsy muse) guide us in this rhythm of life. For most of us, the process was organic and without a lot of thought. For me it was my first apartment, my first real job and the first time camping overnight during a long Minnesota winter.

And now quite unexpectedly, we find ourselves both benefiting and/or suffering from past investments of our youth. The things we did to ourselves, the deposits we made on our bodies, our finances, our love life and our children. We’re now at the stage of making withdrawals from our youthful decisions and indiscretions.

Our life investments have been made, squandered, lost, divested and set aside. Some things worked out and some others didn’t. Now we have the residue of our wisdom or luck or mistakes to live with for the rest of our lives. And all those life steps are now just a memory.

A career was hatched, grown and nurtured or changed many times over. That part of our lives is over unless boredom and fear of retirement pushes us in a new direction.

My bank account of friends isn’t the greatest. A reluctance to make an effort back then, despite the chiding by my wife, has left me lacking in that area. Yet what I do have in the vault is now priceless. One of my aspirations was to mine those rich veins of past friendships to see if I might unearth more nuggets there. Occasionally I’ll strike gold and rekindle a long lost almost forgotten friendship from the dusty archives of my past. It’s a blast and immensely satisfying.

Those random discoveries got me thinking about other friendships; past and future, strong and vapid, present and omnipresent. I thought about the friends I’ve had over the years. Some of them shared isolated points in my life; high school, college and work. Some were but fleeting incisions in the tenderness of my youth. Others were shared experiences like the military; isolated, vacuous and destined to crash with each discharge celebration where inane behavior in the barracks seemed to make perfect sense back then.

Most of those memories are lost now in that vacuum called life experiences. A few were found again but most are just fragrant memories of a life well spent. Like separating wheat from the shaft, I’d love to rekindle a few of those friendships and nourish them back to the point of a commonality we once shared; a kind of harvesting from my ‘lost years.’ Another aspiration was to explore my talents as a writer. Another was to teach the grandchildren.

I guess that’s why I want to continue seeking out opportunities to teach the grandchildren and give them experiences I never had growing up. A recent family trip to London and Paris is a good example. Eleven people living together in a foreign country for 10 days and accumulating wonderful experiences along the way.

So it all comes down to friends and family. I am in a good place in my life. I don’t have to prove anything to anyone anymore! As an artist, I love creating stories in many different genres and I intend to continue writing until my pen dries up or I go blind. I’d like to take my friends and family along on this journey of self-discovery and see whatever else comes our way.

Picking Up Strays

Thanksgiving and Easter can often be orphan holidays.

Most of us expect to be home or at least with family on Christmas and maybe over New Years.  However, often Thanksgiving and Easter lapse into those holidays that find families apart perhaps because of time and distance.

The LaComb family entourage spends time on the coast either around Thanksgiving or during the Christmas holidays depending on their own individual family obligations.  When the whole gang is here for Thanksgiving like last year it’s a whirlwind of family activities, assorted adventures and very little quiet time. But when they’re not here it’s an entirely different story. It is still a family gathering but of a different nature.

It isn’t the holiday per se that makes the day different.  Or the drinks and ordure’s ahead of time. Or the meal or the games we often play afterwards. It turns out that Thanksgiving and Easter are no different here than Christmas or New Year’s Eve back in Minnesota. It’s still a wonderful gathering of like-minded friends and acquaintances. They’re just not family.

 It’s a new tradition for us born out of Mother Hen’s need to entertain and the joy it brings to others who don’t have a place to call home on that special day.  It’s become what we do when regular family members aren’t around.

It’s like the lost generation in Paris who gathered for comfort, companionship, and mental stimulation.  It’s like a folk gathering in Greenwich Village or a poet’s corner in North Beach. It’s a modern day version of the Triangle Bar on Saturday night. We’re all ex-pats from different parts of the country brought here for a variety of reasons and simply trying to spend quality time with like-minded souls.

Strays are often a part of that equation.

More often than not, someone will know somebody or a couple here in town that doesn’t have a place to go for Thanksgiving or Easter.  They then become a part of our extended family for the day. This year in addition to our regular group of friends was two new couples. One had just moved here from Minnesota. The other couple was visiting from Chicago.

That’s when Palm Spring’s own version of Martha Stewart west gets to dress her table with relish…literally.  There is Rosenthal China, Waterford Crystal, antique silver settings, antique salt cellars, individual silver butter knives and place cards with crystal bowls. She would say presentation sets the mood. It’s light, festive, warm, and welcoming.

For that brief afternoon, we’re all gathered among friends or newly made acquaintances sharing a bountiful meal and enjoying one another’s company.

When the day ends and we all disperse back to our regular lives, we’ve been enriched by that shared experience and the joy of giving.

I recently found out that young people nowadays have a new name for Thanksgiving.  They’re calling it ‘Friendsgiving.’

I like that.

It’s a fitting description of what we do here in the desert.

In the Company of Old Men

It was our 50^th high school reunion last fall and I was full of anticipation.

I had gotten an unexpected phone call the summer before from an old classmate who was

a photographer during high school. He had several pictures of he and I from back in grade school and a few in high school. He sent them to me and we started having break-fast every once in a while.

Then through a mutual acquaintance, I reconnected with another casual friend from high school. With both these guys, I was able to recapture some of our old camaraderie with-out reliving our (mostly imagined) glory days.

I was looking forward to reconnecting with several more old comrades from our tenure at our all boys, military, catholic high school. As the reunion grew closer, I started to imagine entering the gathering and immediately reconnecting with homeroom buddies, military misbehavers, chess foes, party planners, old friends and other asundry fellow raiders.

There were several days of activities. A golf tournament: sorry I don’t play. Mass; I don’t think so. Awards given for being alumni for fifty years: no thanks. Finally, the Annual Alumni Banquet where the class of 1961 would be honored (and hit up again.). That I would attend.

I entered the large auditorium full of anticipation and a little dread. Would I recognize any of them? Would they remember me? There was a large sign on one of the breakout rooms: Class of 1961. I moved confidently through the open doors. Would it be like Cheers and there would be a rousing welcome for the kid from down the block? Would I recognize those old familiar faces?

I strolled through the door, confident of my stance and personal appearance.

But instead of my classmates from 1961, I entered a room full of old men.

No one looked up. There was no rousing cheer. A glance or two was all that greeted me as I shyly moved toward the drink table for moral support and a stiff drink to steel my now crumbling self-confidence.

Two things became immediately clear. The gathering around me had been divided into two distinct groups.

The first was the ‘Oh, yeah, he looks about the same with a few miles etched on his face.’

Time and age had been kind to them. A lack of exercise might be apparent and he wasn’t about to replicate his linebacker stance, but he looked pretty much the same.

The second kind of reaction was a cold, clear ‘what the hell happened to him?’ The ravages of time and age had played hell with some of my old classmates. A cruel fact

was that some of them hadn’t aged too well.

Very quickly, I would either recognize an old classmate and tried to remember something we did or had in common. Or I felt I had entered a senior gathering at the home. Little left in between. Of course, there were no mirrors present to dispel my failure to imagine what they might have thought of my appearance.

My old high school girlfriend’s husband was there. After I was dumped, he picked up the slack and won her heart. At the reunion, I got the impression that he took pride in his besting me. In actuality, we both ending up winning. He got good. I got better.

It really wasn’t just my old classmates physical appearance that surprised me. We all grow old. We all change, some of us more so than others. What totally shocked me, as naïve as it may seem, was our total lack of connectedness after all those years.

We had all graduated in May of 1961 and were thrown out into the real world. More real for some of us than others. Now 50 years later, we were meeting once again with absolutely nothing in common except four years at a good school, shared teenage drama and angst, and all our grand plans after that.

After we had graduated, most of us had gone on to college and forged careers that span-ed more than 30 plus years. These were accomplished men. Businessmen, professionals, tradesmen, family men’ and most were respected pillars of their communities.

It was a group I should have been able to relate to. And yet I couldn’t. Instead of ‘Welcome to the Homecoming.’ it was’ Welcome to myself’. This is who I’ve become.

We had all left Cretin with grand aspirations. Most had succeeded in their goals. Yet that absence of fifty years had voided out most of our shared high school memories and left me in a room with one hundred and fifty strangers. Whether their faces were familiar or not, we had no shared experiences beyond high school. We had little to talk about beyond now grandchildren and great grandchildren.

I tried very hard to reconnect with a few several of my classmates that I recognized but it became immediately apparent that there was nothing to talk about. None of us were interested in reliving our past football victories, prom dances, weekend parties or loves found and then shattered when she wised up and found someone better.

We had all collectively moved on after high school and past memories weren’t enough to bond us back together under that nebulous moniker ‘Class of 1961.’

So I left that evening feeling a bit sad and yet glad that I had ventured back into my old stomping grounds if only for one last time. I have little interest in attending our 60^th or 70^th or 80^th reunion (I should be so lucky). It was an interesting experience. So thanks for that.

Part of the thinking of clear-headed people is to ask at some point in their lives, what have I done with my life thus far? And is this all there is? And what now?

At this stage in our collective existence few of us really have anything left to prove to anyone. We’ve either done it or we haven’t. We’ve had good fortune in our marriage or perhaps did better the second or third time around. We’ve connected with our kids or we can keep trying…maybe with a little more attention to our grandchildren in the process.

It’s too damn late to begin over again. I’ll never ride that tramp steamer around the world like I wanted to back in ’61. I’ll never become another Bob Dylan or one of the Beatles. I can’t even play a musical instrument or carry a tune.

There are some things I’m very proud of. Like adult children who are citizens of the world. And five grandchildren who will be at some point in their lives. That is their legacy.

We did some traveling, not so much now.

We made some money, not so much now.

We accumulated a lot of things, not so much now.

Yet I haven’t found a cure for cancer.

I haven’t grown an apple.

I haven’t run a country.

Maybe that’s why I like the idea of reconnecting with old friends. Not to rekindle the past but to honor and appreciate our collective lives and find some semblance of connective- ness for the future. If none is there, none is there. If a new friendship can be woven out of the shared experiences of our past that’s all for the better. If not, then we can recognize our past for what it was and move on with a simple: ‘It was good.’

I never want to ask: Where did it all go? All those hopes and dreams and grand aspirations. Some are now washed away like runoff down a rain gutter.  I have no problem with taking some of that residue I’ve had accumulated over a lifetime and pronouncing part of my past. I have to believe there is still a future in me.

I want to focus on the future, all the while accepting my sometimes-stiff joints, constant need to lose more weight and overall goal of staying healthy.

Maybe that’s why I’ve decided to start another career as a writer. The thought of being retired scares me to death. There’s no reason why it should but it does. Perhaps it’s a fear of beginning that long (hopefully) slow (probably) slide toward who knows where.

I need goals in my life. I need to keep proving to myself that I can or think I can. Therefore I must try. Lame perhaps but it defines who I am…. without apology or explanation.

Who knows, someday I may meet myself coming around the corner. Hope I can recognize what I’ve become.