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?

Seeds out of the Ground

During one of their heart-to-heart sessions recently, Sharon’s mother asked Sharon if she was ever embarrassed by her rural upbringing. I thought it a strange question since Sharon has always embraced her life growing up on the farm. Anyone who knows Sharon understands that her rural heritage brings nothing but pride to her. It seemed a strange question to me until I realized that not all children share the same pride that Sharon does in being a farmer’s child. Some of them move away from their roots, physically and mentally, only to realize later that the green grass on the horizon isn’t always so emerald. Funny how sometimes in our youth we can’t wait to shed the cloak of our pedigree only to end up embracing it as we get older.

Still some folks don’t see it that way. This came to mind recently when a dear colleague of mine decided to leave town. We’d worked together in television for over 35 years before she decided to move from Minnesota to points west. I’m going to miss her a lot. She was a confidant and able translator of most things female. She helped me understand the feminine psychic and was invaluable in helping me craft female characters for my novels. Now her husband has tired of Minnesota winters and decided to pack it in. They’re going to put down roots elsewhere. I certainly wish her well and will be curious how it goes for her.

Dorm for Mass General Hospital, Boston MA

I knew another woman who left the Twin Cities a long time ago. She was born and raised in a small Minnesota town. In college she couldn’t wait to escape the confines of her college campus for a career out east in Boston. Even Saint Paul and Minneapolis were too small for her worldly ambitions. While still an East Coast ex-pat today, she now proudly claims her small town upbringing on her Facebook page, has old classmates as Facebook friends and even flew back for her 50^th high school class reunion.

Maryland Center for Public Broadcasting

The draw of ‘back home’ is strange and mysterious and yet ever present for many of us. In 1977, I was working at the Maryland Center for Public Broadcasting. It was, without a doubt, one of the premier public television stations in the country at the time. I had a great job, a nice house, wonderful friends there and a son just born. Yet I couldn’t wait to return to my Minnesota roots after an absence of five years. Go figure.

I’ve commented in past blogs on my amazement how important one’s upbringing is to so many people. While stationed at the Presidio of San Francisco I would sit around the barracks and listen to my bunk mates lament their being away from their home turf.

One missed being awaken each morning by the L train shaking him out of his bed. Another couldn’t wait to get back to the south side of Chicago just so he could hang out on his favorite street corner again. Our confederate Johnny Reb still didn’t trust Yankees even in the Golden State. He couldn’t wait to get back to Mississippi where they got things ‘right.’

Even with a great part-time job working at an art theater, easy living on base, a great MOS in journalism and adventures many a weekend in that city by the bay, I still missed my Minnesota roots. I wasn’t ready to return home just then but I knew I would once my thirst for new experiences and adventures had subsided.

Aerial view of Palm Springs, CA

Palm Springs is like a modern-day version of the fur trappers rendezvous. In Palm Springs everyone is from someplace else. I’m always taken aback when asked where I’m from and when I say Minnesota the other party may occasionally respond ‘Min-es-o-ta’ in their best Fargo imitation. I then calmly respond “No, I said Minnesota” and nothing more because it’s usually in polite company. Those are words uttered by the untraveled and uninitiated. Most of us got it a long time ago.

I’ve also referenced the interesting twists and turns of friendships in this regional melting pot in another blog entitled Like Snowflakes come and gone. Like many other resort towns such as Key West and Las Vegas a lot of the residents are transients in passing. They spend the winters away from home but like homing pigeons always leave in the spring.

For many, the siren call of our youth is a powerful magnet always calling us back home.

High Desert Mecca

Far from the crystal clear pools of Palm Springs and its emerald green golf courses lies another world. Less than an hour away, it’s a world of vast nothingness peppered with the sad remnants of past lives and male exuberance. It’s a place where stillness thunders louder than the wind and God did some of his finest paintings.

We took the family there last Christmas for a day long excursion. It was cold and dark and overcast. A wonderland of strange rock formations, contorted plants and trees and the ever present wind tugging at our bundled up bodies. Far from the craziness of L.A. and the teaming masses of the inland empire, Joshua Tree is a world unto its own.

Joshua tree and its surrounding communities embrace another form of existence; all of which is surrounded by endless horizons. The area is a mecca for aging rock stars, artists and modern-day bohemians along with ordinary people all in search of a new beginning.

It’s the place where people go to get lost and be forgotten.

The high desert of the Morongo Basin is like a modern day outback of more than 9.5 million acres of public land in the California desert. Its home to old walking trails first used by Native Americans between seasonal encampments then followed by Spanish explorers and finally 19^th century gold seekers and pioneers.

1.7 billion year old rocks compete for attention with the ancient land mass of Rodinia and King Clone and 11.000 year old creosote bush that began its life during the retreat of the last Ice Age.

Reminders of past human lives are everywhere. Abandoned mines litter the area with their relics of past hopes and dreams scattered about the ground. A restored railroad depot stands alone with its tracks still leading nowhere. Ramshackle old cabins planted amid miles of sage and scrub brush, sit isolated and lonely in the desert. The evidence is all here if you can look past the dust and dirt and castles made of boulders to imagine all the past lives that once past through this place on the way to a better life.

This is a playground where grown men come to play cowboy and young boys come to play soldier.

Pioneer town was founded fifty years ago as the perfect backdrop for early television westerns and grade B movies. Gene Autry led his assorted group of Hollywood wranglers to recreate a true replica of an old western town just three hours from Hollywood and Vine. Up the road, young boys learn the art of war amid 935 square miles of rock and dirt. Between Pioneer town and Twenty-Nine Palms (the Marine Corp Air Ground Combat Center) lie all the ingredients for growing up very quickly.

Much like the high altitude cerebral vacuum of the San Jacinto’s, Joshua Tree is the perfect setting for letting your mind wander and bumping into thoughts and ideas and feelings that you never knew were lurking there.

 It means nestling into a large boulder, resting your head on its warm pillow of granite, looking up at the pure blue flawless sky and listening to your surroundings. The stillness will batter your eardrums with a quiet so loud that all you can do is retreat back inside your head for peace and serenity.

Where's Waldo 1,2, & 3?

The high desert is a cornucopia of images, lifestyles, attitudes, ambitions and dreams from a plethora of characters; real and imagined. It’s where you go to lose yourself and perhaps find the unexpected. It’s where the ghosts of past rock and roller stars still play their mournful ballads for no one to hear but the wind.

And it’s where writers go to ask ‘what if.’