Relative Something

It’s like a high school reunion, only different. Every year around this time, a group of people who once worked at the same company gather at a pub to check out where the world has taken everyone and to revisit a range of memories. I left that company over 12 years ago after 18 good years of employment. I met some of the smartest people I have ever worked with during those years and I experienced valuable friendships. It is very rewarding to again be able to see some of the people from that time in my life.

I find it puzzling that my memory comes up so absolutely blank on a person that I recognize; someone who I know I had a fair amount of interaction with, and especially for someone I particularly remember liking. I wonder if it had anything to do with the name not being unusual. Last night, it was Jeff, from the Software department. I needed to ask, as embarrassing as that can be, but then we were able to relive some fun, shared recollections of a project we worked together on.

I found myself telling the story of recently cutting off my dreadlocks, and sharing details of Cyndie’s and my adventure of traveling to Portugal to work with Ian and his family at their Forest Garden Estate. I fear that my stories, which are so darn much fun for me to relive, probably go on a little bit longer than my audience really cares to hear. Kind of like my writing sometimes, I suppose. At least here, you have the ability to skim over segments of my excessive verbosity. In person, people have to resort to excusing themselves to use the restroom or needing to go get another beer at the bar.

My memory got some good exercise last night, which is just what I needed. It’s the only exercise I’ve had since I sprained my ankle. It also was the kind of party that provides a real energizing afterglow; also something I needed to help break the sense of exhaustion that the long, hard days in the trenches of the day-job have been dishing out lately.

Speaking of which, even though it’s Saturday, back in the trenches is just where you’ll find me today. Workin’ another Saturday.

My memory tells me there was a time I had weekends off. Ah, those were the good ol’ days.

Continuing on a theme I started yesterday, I am enjoying remembering being a little boy. Also, I like inspiring my siblings’ memories with snapshots from our past. In honor of the start of baseball season, I dug up this little gem.

I think I was being groomed early on to be a Twins fan. Don’t I just look extraordinarily excited for the season to be underway? My family will remember that spot as the stairs leading up to the center circle of the driveway on the farm. They will also probably recall that my apparent glee of that moment was likely short lived, and I would have found something to brood about soon after.

I loved playtime of my youth. And what a playground we had on that farm. Riding my tricycle on that long driveway. Digging in the dirt of the center circle to play with my toy trucks. Going on adventures down to the chestnut tree or the old tennis court. The chicken coop that had been turned into a clubhouse. The barns. The back yard where we had worn out our own ‘home plate’ into the grass.

I guess I’ll reveal, I’ve been working on the old slide show of the farm that I set to music, converting it from video tape to a digital file I can manipulate and post, and it has contributed to my recent reliving of the past. Maybe someday in the near future I will be able to trigger more memories with a revised version of the farm slide show that can be seen online. It all depends on my ability to hurdle a few technological obstacles that lie in the path toward my goal. I’m not feeling as spry as I once was with these kinds of projects, and my much more new-tech savvy son no longer lives at home, so the odds of succeeding in a timely fashion right now are low.

I give up. I am powerless against their dominance. It is obvious that I am not in control. I never was. It has all been a facade. I’ve fooled myself to think otherwise. I am but a lowly minion to the all-powerful ad agencies of the world. I may not buy what they are selling, but I am helpless against their wily craft of getting my attention.

When I heard the song being used for a television ad recently, my attention was immediately wrenched, without my permission, from whatever it was I had been paying attention to prior. I had no intention of giving one iota of attention to a commercial. Next, I found myself lost in a fruitless search of my feeble memory to figure out why the sounds I had heard in that commercial were tugging so strongly on my heart-strings.

It took several similar re-enactments of this scene before Cyndie or I were aware enough to actually notice what company the commercial was selling. I had my doubts, but Cyndie appeared confident as she searched for the song in the Travelers Insurance commercial with the Lego people. I swore that it had to be something from my childhood. I was right.

I found it interesting that the answer was easy to find in the multiple results that appeared from other people who had already searched for the very same thing. And no wonder. Some brilliant ad agency had used a classic BBC Radio theme, Puffin’ Billy, the same song used for the children’s television series, Captain Kangaroo.

I bow to their prowess, but I think dredging for long-forgotten childhood memories is a pretty shallow victory for advertisers to claim.

I don’t understand why this memory is lingering in my present day awareness, but trying to analyze it has revealed to me how fractured my recollection is. I’m guessing I was about 9, or possibly 10, years old. It was the first time in my life that I believed I was facing my own death. Up to that time, I had experienced only limited exposure to lakes or pools and did not know how to swim. I was playing on a floating raft at a swimming beach on Red Rock Lake, jumping from the raft into the neck-deep water. I didn’t realize the raft had moved to deeper water because I had become mesmerized with the experience of jumping into that water.

I know that I was with others, but I have no recollection who it specifically was. I have a sense that they contributed to my feeling blissfully free of apprehension. I don’t believe anyone noticed the time I jumped into water that was deeper than I was tall. It was a moment of 1, or maybe 2, seconds in which I mentally processed a lot more thought than that amount of time could allow.

Of all the bits and pieces of memory from this event, this is the most vivid of all: the combined feeling of shock and calm. I hadn’t sensed any hint of this possibility. I was in total oblivion of the fun I was having when all at once, I was faced with this potentially fatal reality. I surmised that I had reached the end of my life. I remember the instant of surprise, but in that same split second, the significant, calm insight that this would be it.

Pretty much as a reflex, I pushed off the bottom and sputtered as my face broke the surface. I went down again and without even thinking about it, pushed off like before. Keep in mind that the depth was probably just barely over my head, but to a kid who can’t swim, there is no range of depth; it’s either over your head, or not, and over your head may as well be the deep sea. Since it was not a long distance from where I had previously been playing, my 2 or 3 bounces had landed me back in my neck-deep zone, and that quick, I had overcome the expected demise.

Embarrassment kept me from addressing what had just transpired. Since no one appeared to have noticed, I figured it best to just keep it to myself, lest the fact of my not having learned to swim yet become something to talk about. I liked it better, left unsaid. I seem to have permanently logged the sensation of the lake bottom on my feet, the impression of a mother or sister (not necessarily mine) on shore under a tree, a variety of ages of kids playing in the water, and a day of hazy sunshine or more gray than blue sky. I have no real image of what the raft was like. I have a sense that my interest in jumping off the raft anymore was dashed, and I was left with the mixture of wanting to disavow any knowledge of what just happened, and yet still explore the drama I had just been through.

In addition to being fascinated by the different fragments of memory associated with this incident, I am also curious as to why it seems to be residing in the area of my conscious awareness of late. It strikes me now as I capture all this in writing, that I can’t wrangle a recollection of the point in which I finally achieved mastery of skills in the art of swimming. I bet it wasn’t too long after that. Maybe it served as a personal motivation. My teen years involved a pretty significant amount of time on and in Lake Riley at the Daly’s. There are quite a few memory fragments associated with that, but unlike my perceived brush with death, those remain ensconced deep in the catacombs of rarely disturbed files of the memory bank.