Chasing My Identity

I have a friend who conducts workshops on how to write your own obituary. The responses to her workshop always seem go one of two ways. The first group wrinkles their nose and responds with a frown “Oh, Lord, I don’t want to talk about my own death.” The more optimistic of that group then adds “and besides, I’m never going to die.” It’s denial at its most optimistic stance.

The second group recognizes that my friend’s workshops are an opportunity to make their own farewell statement. These folks realize that they now have an opportunity to say just what they want to say about their own lives instead of it coming from some boiler-plate funeral home ad or a template from the newspaper. They get to share with family, friends and associates just what was important to them and what they are most proud of for the time they spent here on earth.

I’m in that second group. I want to tell the world what I did with my life…once I figure it out.

At first blush I’d have to say I’ve been very lucky on so many levels. Then having said that I would also add that I’m unapologetic for past failures, mistakes, losses, missed opportunities and a wide assortment of sundry missteps that have also defined my life. At this stage of the game, I’m too old and too busy to worry about ‘what might have been’ or ‘what if’ or ‘if only...’

I guess my own story begins with a French Canadian guy whose parents came from someplace in Canada. He was a short guy with a pencil-thin mustache and (supposedly) a fondness for the drink. He went from Michigan and ended up in the Twin Cities. He was playing in a band in St. Cloud, Minnesota when he met my mother. She was just a young German Catholic girl recently off the farm.

So my heritage is French Canadian and German. But what does that mean in the greater scheme of things? It is a heritage that I have no affinity to nor interest in…because it has no roots. As was befitting the rural German Catholic culture of that time, my mother never spoke of my father either before or after he passed away. It was as if he never existed in the first place. If I had a past, it is buried in a mausoleum in Saint Paul.

I can lay out a few of the stats, facts and incidents that defined who I became. I was young and dumb and poor but open and honest. I’d like to believe that, much like my writing, I stumbled a lot but somehow kept moving forward.

I can talk about those men and women who had an influence on my life. I can talk about working from 7^th grade on and usually having two jobs going on simultaneously. I can talk about twenty plus years of working full time, running my business and managing several apartment buildings all at the same time. I can talk about near burn out and finally redemption on long bike rides, torturous trail runs and sojourns into the high desert.

It’s always a challenge to revisit that narrative in my head about my life up to a certain point. The facts are easy to lie out and document. I could put them into a flow chart or a neatly outlined diagram that lists important dates in my life. It’s neat and clean but still smells like an old tattered history book. Something is missing. The data would tell you how I got to where I am but it wouldn’t tell you how I ended up being who I am today.

There is a ‘60’s time warp in my head. A wonderful period of creativity with its music and Bob Dylan and the Beatles and hippies and personal liberation and milestones. But I don’t apologize for that. It is part of who I have become. It doesn’t take away from my life today but instead comforts and feeds me more material for my stories.

Do I want to share the joys of a life well lived or wax philosophically about past lives, past loves, past failures and hopes for the future? I guess it’s a combination of both.

I am not interested in ‘what if’s.’ Bob Dylan said ‘Don’t look back.’ I would add as a caveat unless you’re in a good place. Because if you’re in a good place in your life today then you can look back and see the success and the failure, the goals that fell short and those never attempted. You can look at your life as it truly was and not as someone else said it should be.

One friend recently commented to me that it was too bad I hadn’t started my writing career years earlier. I simply replied that I couldn’t have done that years ago because I wasn’t the same person that I am today. My head was in a different place back then. Neither better nor worse but probably not conducive to the focused passion I feel for my writing today.

I guess I’m foolish enough to believe that old cliché that it’s never too late to become the person you’ve always wanted to be. I am today the result of a million different experiences, episodes, loves, failures, losses, challenges and successes that rippled through my life over the last seventy years.

 

Zen and the Art of Running

I read a book recently called Zen and the Art of Running. The author pointed out that a runner changes every day and shouldn’t expect the same results today as he might have gotten last week or last year or ten years ago. Like many others, I am constantly changing and evolving and adapting to the nuances of each day.

I have another friend who has defined life in three simple words: Learning, Earning and Yearning. His position is that we grow up with certain knowledge. We make a living. Then (he claims) we yearn for what we didn’t do or don’t have or lost. I don’t think it has to necessarily be that way.

I can’t do nor do I want to do what I did before. I do not want to wear a younger man’s façade. The years of experience and joy and disappointment run lines across my face but I wear them like a seasoned veteran in the games of life.

My new identity is a moniker I wear with pride and is defined by the stories I tell. My blogs are just one step in that direction. They are personal, explicit, revealing, open and honest. But in the end, they are simply meant to be a snapshot of a moment in time in the life of…

My life in Pictures

My lost years

Snow white and the seven seekers

Howling monkeys

Ditching my son in the Amazon

Today I am much more interested in telling my stories and living my life vicariously through my characters. I want to share the fear of humping my hog through the boonies, riding old Apache trails and avoiding ambush in some narrow slot canyon. I want to mastermind the intricate workings of a modern-day courtship and look in on two women slowly falling in love. I want my protagonist to fall in love with a siren of my own creation.

I want the new me to splatter my keyboard with stories of past adventures, mishaps, wondrous experiences and my characters grand plans for the future. I want to live the life of a drifter out west and an adventurer on the Mekong Delta. And I want to do that until my ink dries up and my mind slowly fades away.

I haven’t written my own obituary yet but when I do, it’ll probably start with something like…

“He had a good life…and then it got even better.”

Gold Coast ... the Wild Coast

The Chinese have a saying that a journey begins with a single step. I’d change that a little to say a real journey often begins in naivety, progresses to actuality by accident and somehow finds its place in one’s memory bank through sheer happenstance, perseverance and dumb luck.

Like some wonderful party that can’t be replicated afterwards even if all the same participants gathered together, once again, at the same place; a journey is really a time capsule. It’s a sliver of space in one’s life that gives birth to either good memories or bad, to wonderful thoughts or sad reflections. Yet it always remains locked in that serendipitous turn of events which can never be changed, replicated or replaced. Whatever happened did happen. Whatever was gained can’t be changed even if it later becomes lost on in a fog of future events.

A few months ago, I reflected on my experiences in San Francisco in my blog “Young Heart by the Bay.”  A tiny fraction of that experience was a road trip I took back in the autumn of 1964.

It was my first real road trip.

The idea was born early one Sunday morning in some unnamed dive bar on North Beach.

We were a motley assortment of drugstore cowboys, fast food aficionados and one kid with two years of college under his belt. Each of us ruminating on about our pending release from military service a monumental two years away. This was long before “Easy Rider” and my own sojourn to Danmark.

What were we going to do after the service? Return to college. Head out for Europe. Stay in San Francisco or hit the road just like Jack Kerouac did in “On the Road.”

The more sober philosophers among us thought we should get on with our lives. We should go back home after our hitch was up, get an education, marry our college sweetheart and settle down to the good old standard American life. The more inebriated among us thought otherwise. Another round of beers and an impromptu survey was taken. The open road garnered first place with Europe a close second. Returning home to suburban tranquility didn’t even register.

Some of us were already open road desperados. One guy had a big-ass Triumph 650cc motor-cycle with enough horsepower to fly between San Francisco to Los Angeles in record time. He went down to the city of angels almost every weekend to see his girlfriend. That is until a transfer landed him in the middle of nowhere Indiana in a snowstorm and his bike went into cold storage.

A couple of guys had souped-up cars they’d brought to the Presidio from back home. But soon one fellow was shipped off to Vietnam and another got transferred to Okinawa. Several more wannabes disappeared when sobriety raised its ugly head. So that effectively took most of my gang out of the picture. I was the only one left with my Vespa motor scooter and exaggerated, romantic notions of the open road still spinning around in my head.

A dream had been ignited in my plastic brain that resonated throughout my body. I decided I might as well hit the asphalt right then and there instead of waiting another two years before my release was up. My destination would be the distant lands north of the Golden Gate Bridge. At that point, they were just shadowy mounds of gray that kissed the skyline outside my office window.

This was the old Northern California countryside before multiple ballot propositions changed the political and social landscape and a bulging San Francisco spilled its inhabitants far and wide; spilling out across the bay to once tiny hamlets like Sausalito, Mount Tamaulipas and Stinson Beach. A time when cows roamed empty fields amid gun emplacements that still protected San Francisco bay from Japanese battleships. An era, before satellites, when radar stations scanned the northern skies for raiders from Russia. A time when only a few small enclaves of new housing slashed into the green hillsides. A time when the only sound heard was the putt-putt of my tiny Italian engine against a wind blowing ocean-side and birds on high, floating silently in the sea breeze.

So one Monday morning, instead of heading to work at the Command Information Office, I saddled up my trusty stead, wrapped supplies on the saddle rack and crossed the Golden Gate Bridge for points north.

After I had braved the crazy traffic on the bridge, I swung north to the tiny enclave of Sausalito. Even back then Sausalito was a very special place. During the war, the Navy had installed a host of ship maintenance facilities. By the sixties those had all disappeared but a lot of the ship workers had stayed. They were joined by displaced beats and hippies from across the bay. Together they made Sausalito an eclectic community, a growing artist colony and home to the funky and weird.

I got my regular cup of Joe and sat on the dock, peering out across the bay back to my new life and home and I wondered where the road might take me next.

On the way out of town, I spotted this inlet where fancy cars were parked in front and yachts in back. It was a novel idea at the time, priceless in this day and age. 

 

Later that morning, I stopped at the Christian Brothers winery. I didn’t see any of my old high school teachers there but a couple of glasses of vino did wonders for the rest of my trip that afternoon.

The first sign of encroaching humanity. The pristine countryside of Sausalito was becoming just another suburb of San Francisco. 

Some rundown motel among the sequoias was my refuge for that first night. Exhausted, dirty and yet feeling exhilarated. Note the sleeping bag I had hauled along. What was I thinking?

This was one of dozens of inlets along the coast road where the sea had dumped its collection of driftwood and debris on land. I’m sure there were treasures down there but I never stopped to investigate

 

I was so tempted to ride down to this house to see who lived there. I can’t image a more remote, mysterious and wonderful place to live. It was probably some writer toiling on the great American novel and suffering the pangs of a broken love affair.

Back along the bay, I came across this new military housing complex being built. The view out their front door was to die for.

But more fascinating were the old World War Two defensive installations that ran up and down the bayside. A concrete collection of pillboxes, command centers and the foundations for large cannons which would have been pointed out to sea.

Then behind those old fortifications was a new radar facility and cameras pointed down at a kid on a scooter who was peering up at them.

Some of the dozen places along the coast where I was lost and didn’t really care. I had gas to go and wanderlust running rampant through my veins. 

By the end of the week, I was flying with wild abandon. Yet I only crashed once, taking a curve too fast on wet leaves and ending up in a gully sans my glasses, hat and pride. The scooter was OK except for the mud and leaves that coated its undercarriage with brown muck.  I found my glasses, picked the dirt out of my teeth and climbed back up on the saddle again.

During that week, one song in particular kept bouncing around in my head. “Four Strong Winds” by Ian and Sylvia. It spoke of loss, separation and the infinitesimal yearning for something better even if ‘it’ couldn’t be defined at the time. It’s a great song and still brings back a lot of fond memories.

After a week of meandering the bays and inlets, the back roads and tiny towns hugging the coast, I immerged out of a grove of redwood trees and found myself by some main artery that fed humanity back down toward the bay area. I used that as a beacon to head back south and my home.

The trip was soon forgotten and aside from being captured in some old color slides it became a fading memory that was soon overshadowed by a multitude of other life events including a traumatic trip home between transfers. Yet somehow those old slides followed me around for another forty-six years until a friend suggested I transfer them to digital.

ScanCafe released them from their cardboard sleeves and jogged a memory capsule in the back of my head. After gathering dust for forty plus years, those images took me back to a time when I was young and free and full of wondrous ideas and aspirations.

I realize now that during my trip I was living in the moment…what Buddhists all mindfulness. Today we would translate that as conscious living.  In his book “Wherever You Go There You Are – mindfulness meditation in everyday life,” author Jon Kabat-Zinn talks about mindfulness as enlightening and liberating work. “It is enlightening in that it literally allows us to see more clearly, and therefore come to understand more deeply, areas in our lives that we were out of touch with or unwilling to look at.”

I should ride a scooter more often.

My California coastal tour was the first of several road trips. That was then, this is now. I’m not much for road trips anymore. I guess I’m too impatient to get wherever I want to go. But back then, it was my first time skirting asphalt and concrete, tasting the grit and grime of the open road and opening my virgin mind to all kinds of possibilities. Some of which actually came true.

Life can be strange that way.