Turning Seventy-Five

Even back then I couldn’t understand the hype surrounding ‘turning twenty-one.’ It was simply a number that had little meaning to me. I was already doing what I was doing, legal or not. In fact, the only thing I did to recognize that momentous occasion was to let a friend take me to a bar (his favorite) and drink legally for the first time.

Two weeks later I was inducted into the United States Army and from then on age mattered even less.

Thirty came and we were living in Maryland and loving it. Sharon had a great job with Baltimore County Schools and I was managing the Program Distribution Department at the Maryland Center for Public Broadcasting. I was well into writing my first novel and there were no kids yet.

The mythical forty year mid-life crisis slipped by unnoticed because I was simply too busy with other things. The kids were growing up by the minute. Sharden Productions, Inc. was expanding along with several investment projects plus a full time job in public television. I had little time for anything else.

Fifty years of age came and went and wasn’t even noticed.

Sixty meant I was nearing the end of my working career with no clear substitute on the horizon.

My seventy birthday marked a wonderful celebration when both adult children and their respective families made a surprise visit to us in the desert. It reminded me how lucky I truly was.

Now at the ripe young age of seventy-five I am eleven novels, five plays, four screenplays and too many treatments to count, into my new writing career. I’ve made it this far with no regrets and a deep appreciation for a life well-lived. I’ve been incredibly lucky in my relationship with Sharon and our immediate family, my health and friends; past and present. This new writing phase is just icing on the cake; seventy-five years in the making.

Reflecting back on the details of one’s life often reveals a much larger mirror picture. Old black and white photographs, cryptic notes, official documents, and period relics hold captive a bank vault of stored memories.

I have finally come to appreciate all that my mother did for me, intentionally or otherwise. I am now able to recognize the tremendous sacrifices she made for my sister and me. Sadly, I was never able to see that clearly when I was growing up or in her later years. My biggest regret is that I was never close to her. But then again it’s hard to be close to someone who was never able to show even a hint of love and affection toward her children.

Military service, like living in Europe, afforded me life lessons no textbook could ever replicate. I’ve encountered many people who have taught me about life in so many different ways. Some straight to the heart, other lingering beneath the surface, still others in looks and glances and gestures made. Some I understood, others were confusing but all were learning experiences.

Women in particular made the strongest impact on my life. I’ve often wondered if the dysfunction I experienced at home caused me confusion and distraction on the dating scene. It probably did. The names I remember, many of the details not so much. I’m sure it was a combination of my immaturity, insecurity and over-active hormones that fractured many a friendship. But wonderful teachers they all were.

So, here’s an appreciative tip of my hat to Diane, Joyce, Sheila, Marti, Susan and all the others whose faces and memories remain cloaked in that uncertainty and fog of pending senility. Life lessons each and every one of them and most not realized until I was much further down the road. And, of course, a heart-felt salute to the greatest teacher of them all with whom I’ve lived a full life for more than forty-six years.

It’s been one heck of a ride thus far. Yet there are still so many plays, novels, screenplays, songs, comic strips and who knows what else left to create.

I just hope there’s enough time.

On the Road Again

It’s my first long distance bike ride of the season and the season is almost over.

My normal routine of long bike rides was upended this summer by play practice, acting, and finally the production of my own play ‘Riot at Sage Corner.’ I sprinted to freedom the morning after our cast party.

Long distance bike riding, or in reality, meandering - is soul-searching at its finest. It’s yoga on wheels and meditation in the saddle. It’s a rediscovery of past haunts, mis-spent youth, lost love and between the sign posts… myself.  I’m alone with my recollections, dreams, passions and ever-present tape recorder to capture those fleeting thoughts that sometimes go in one ear and get stuck there.

The coffee shop is a welcome sight of iron riders and rail thin runners. These mostly white middle-age athletes are gearing up for several races this fall.  They’re early morning vagabonds who need their cup of Joe to kick-start each day. It’s an eclectic group of support crew, racers, runners and neighborhood hangers-on gathered together to taste the first bite of dawn and forthcoming self-induced punishment. I’m here to look and marvel and suppress my envy.

There are also a lot of runners out training for the Twin Cities Marathon. The Tour de France wannabes haven’t yet begun to cluster around my coffee shop before their race down Summit Avenue. Today it’s only the hardcore diehards or marginally insane who are out exercising this frosty morning.

After they leave I’ll begin my Saturday morning meanderings through the Twin Cities. There won’t be an agenda or route to follow. My imagination and ever elusive recollections of times past will point me in some direction. Crossing the bridge, I see the U of M rowing club is out before barges crowd the waterways.

It used to be that during the summer months I’d take long bike rides to peruse my old haunts for changes or as a way to recap old memories still lingering there. But something happened late last summer that altered that perception.

Surprisingly it wasn’t the old haunts that had changed. Instead it was something that clicked differently inside my head that time around. I came to the sobering realization that not only were the old places gone but now they were relegated to the dust bins of history.

The Twin Cities had become a wasteland of relics from my past. A time long forgotten except in black and white photos and old vinyl recordings. Time has that tendency to erase most vestiges of a period and in its place leave only vapid memory vapors that drift in and out of our consciousness from time to time.

The changes were all around me but I didn’t see it until last fall.

Much like another blog At the corner of Fairview and Summit, this ride will take me past a lot of my old haunts and a retracing of my other lives. Most of those old places are now generations apart from where I am today. But they still bring back a boatload of memories, most of them good and a few very poignant.

It’s so early on Summit Avenue, the governor is still asleep. My first romantic breakup after Sunday mass took place just down the block. At this point in my third and last marathon I was pretty much a walking, jogging zombie; each step as painful as the last. I worked briefly for the Catholic Archdiocese in the James J. Hill Mansion. Sharden Productions, Inc. and related real estate ventures were conceived in those oak-paneled halls.

The Little French Church is now surrounded by high-rise apartments and light rail tracks. For me it was eight years of Catholic education. Daily mass because we had to and public transportation before it became hip. Does anyone remember the street cars which came before buses?

I moved with public television down to Lowertown when it was still empty warehouses and parking lots. Now it’s a hip thriving ‘happening’ place for millennials. Nearby the Mississippi River has long been a magnet for the land-locked before Laguna Beach and the PCH fueled my own latent surfer’s imagination.

    

Melanie’s home is just two blocks off of my old paper route. Here the latest rage is teardowns and larger homes because the neighborhood has gotten so hot. Who knew? Fifty years ago we couldn’t wait to ‘get out of Dodge.’ Now they’re flocking back to raise their families in my old backyard.

There’s something about this place that still draws me back even in the chill of early fall. And it has nothing to do with the images that corporate and government Minnesota want to paint for outsiders.

Forget about what the PR hacks are saying or the Chamber of Commerce’s latest spiel about the glories of living in Minnesota. Forget our professional (subsidized) sports teams or even dare I say, Garrison Keller’s Prairie Home Companion as a folksy homespun version of Grandma’s tales of yesteryear.

      

Instead I’m talking about a culture of intrinsic family values, a creed of hard work and an unapologetic pride in being from here. They say our cold weather leaves just the strong of heart behind. I touched on this in my blog: Going Home Again. Whether it’s true or not, it is a moniker I subscribe to.

I don’t think I’ll be retracing my old bike routes anymore. It won’t be because of bad memories. Rather the absence of visible landmarks makes it harder to reconcile memories with recollection, nostalgia with history and reality with a reflective glance at my past. It’s a gravel road that has been paved over.

Yet time is on my side. I still get to look back through old photographs in awe and amazement at what once was while still listening to those old familiar musical refrains. I’m still reliving so much that others can’t or won’t see or feel themselves.

Come next spring, new adventures wait. Charlotte, my youngest granddaughter, is now a two-wheeler like her brother. Perhaps I can enlist them as my posse and together we can discover new routes and adventures around the Twin Cities. I’ll be a younger man then and hopefully still eager to blaze new memory trails for that younger generation.

Perhaps I’ll cross trails with some old memory haunts yet undiscovered.

That wouldn’t be a bad thing either.