Posts Tagged ‘Memories’
Tour de Prairie
I finally got myself on the bicycle on Saturday. It was nice to discover the bike remains in good shape. I added air to the tires, touched up the chain with a bit of lube, and it was ready to go. With minimal effort, I was able to find all my gear, although the helmet required a bit of adjustment to the straps in order to fit my head, sans dreadlocks.
I took my camera along and did a spontaneous tour of my community. The trees are just starting to pop. I meandered my way past Bryant Lake toward the place on Flying Cloud Drive where I worked for 18 years. Part of the building still remains, but much of it has been torn down and replaced by something different. I traveled among the buildings of the industrial park that replaced the farm of my earliest years. I rode past the Enblom’s place and then took a lap on the trail around Smetana lake. There were a lot of geese sitting on nests in the reeds along the shoreline.
Next, I traveled past the shopping mall where I worked at a record store for a year after I graduated from high school. Then south on Homeward Hills Road to Pioneer Trail where I ventured past Franlo Road to see if friends were out in their yard doing chores. Nobody home. Looked like they were away for the weekend.
Backtracking, I made my way to the sport fields by the airport where I coached soccer for so many years. I rode into the buzz of the Saturday afternoon activity to get a big dose of memories. I stood for a bit and watched a baseball team work on bunting defense. Repetition, repetition, repetition. It was fun to hear the kids shouting commands to each other, demonstrating they were aware of what they were doing.
The only thing left between that site and my destination of home was the neighborhood where I lived after the farm. I slowly pedaled on Cedar Ridge Road to the cul-de-sac where our house was located. They have changed the house numbers! Is nothing sacred? I tried and tried to see the trees of the neighborhood as 35 years older. It doesn’t look that different, except for the two trees right in front that have been planted since we left. The large number of cedar trees have hardly changed a bit. I’d be willing to bet there are few, if any, of the same families living in those houses.
As I passed the Picha farm spring plant sale, just before the street to my house, I saw that my odometer indicated 25 miles. I accomplished just enough distance, and exposed my unprotected limbs to just short of being burned by the sun, so I felt it was a good first-of-the-season ride.
Now, to somehow get myself to do it again before too long. Sunday, my neck muscles were tired and my seat was feeling tender. I have a lot of work to do to get into shape for my annual week of biking in June.
For Mom
What little boy doesn’t feel that Mom is everything? It is not so hard to understand why a person would believe that their mother is the best in the world. My mother invented food. She made my clothes. My mom was the rock in all situations; the calm in any storm. Elizabeth (Betty) Elliott Hays did not lecture me on who I should be, she enabled me to become who I am. She demonstrated to me how to be a good person by being a good person. Most of the time, she was oblivious to that fact. Not only was my mother the most wholesomely classy person imaginable, she was the best mother in the world. Happy Mother’s Day, Mom.
Nepal Thoughts
April is the time of year when I traveled to Nepal. That was a couple of years ago now. It is on my mind a lot this year because I have friends who are currently on a trek similar to mine. When I think back on my trip, and revisit some of the photos I took, the feeling I get is that the whole experience was more than I could absorb. I lived it, but it was more than I could grasp, even as I stood there breathing it in. Looking at the images again, somehow brings back vague hints of the vastness of experience. It almost feels as if the parts of that adventure that were beyond my ability to fully grasp in the moment, were not lost to that moment. Even though I couldn’t fully process it all, it still became part of me. The aspect of the trek that was beyond my comprehension still colors the portion of my life that is the event. The mystery moves forward within me. The same thing probably applies to many such adventures, but to me, it just seems so fitting for an experience in Nepal.
Now Then
I have already shared this with all of my siblings, and also with my Brainstorms community, so it almost seems redundant to post it here. However, I think it has a universal appeal for the novelty of capturing the similar poses and for the always interesting visual of comparative shots of people when they are young and when they aren’t as young.
I have been wanting to do this for a long time, but younger brother, David, lives up north and older brother, Elliott, wasn’t able to be at our family reunion gathering last summer, so getting the three of us together has been rare.
My family tolerated my attempts to try (probably too hard) to direct the shot to be exact. I thought Elliott should take off his glasses. He disagreed. I respect his opinion that they belong.
In the end, Elliott got the ‘last word’ in about my drive to accomplish a pose exactly the same as the first picture. I only had one image available on my camera when I got home, so after I pasted them together, I sent it out to the family asking if anyone had a better version. I noted that in this image, I didn’t have my shoulders squared to the camera, and with multiple photographers taking pictures, Elliott was looking at a different camera than this one.
Elliott sent this, in reply:
Authentic Joy
Lately, I have been thinking about the accuracy of memory, in particular, earliest memories. Many are augmented, or even supplanted by photographs we have from the past. I don’t actually remember some things that happened, I remember what it looked like from a picture I have repeatedly seen that depicts the moment.
I recently began tinkering with transferring some of our old home-videos from tape to a digital video file. I do remember this particular moment, but it would never be so genuinely presented if we hadn’t managed to capture the video of it. I’m so glad to have this to show my daughter, Elysa, the fun we had during the time before she can remember.
Memory Party
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.
More Remembering
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.
Time Passing
The passing of time happens faster than I can keep track of, yet change often comes very slowly. Perspective, perspective, perspective. I suppose a person who masters living entirely in the moment has a more consistent impression about the passing of time than I am able to achieve.
The common opinion around my region is that winter has been hanging around for a long time this year. However, even though we accumulated some huge piles of snow, and the prolonged cold temperatures and additional inches of new snow carried on into the first weeks of spring, it seems to me like the return to being able to see the ground happened rather fast.
What is fast? If someone takes steps to consistently eat healthy and begin doing regular exercise to lose weight and improve fitness, would the weight loss and increased fitness happen fast? Well, if they held to it for an entire year, and you hadn’t seen them in all that time, it might appear to you that their change happened fast. To the person making the effort to eat well and exercise toward a goal of making such changes, a year would seem like slow change.
I am wondering if my hair is turning gray at an increased rate. When I cut off my dreadlocks at the beginning of 2011, it had been 5 years since my last haircut. There was plenty of evidence as to what color my hair used to be on the ends of those dreads. I assumed that cutting it all off would leave me with a much higher percentage of gray, but I was surprised to find it didn’t appear to be the case. Now, 3-and-a-half months later, my hair is growing out a bit, and seems to be graying as it grows. Seems like fast change to me.
For some reason, I have neglected to get my bike down from its winter perch in the garage yet. I expect that the next 2 months until my annual week-long bike trip will pass very quickly. Of course, the sad truth is that when that week of biking with friends arrives, I want it to last forever, but it passes by real fast. Scary fast. Well, unless the weather is incredibly miserable. That can change things a bit.
I’m a little shocked that it is approaching the middle of April. It boggles my mind that we are in the year 2011. How did we get here so fast? Just a little while ago, I was an 11-year-old boy, running out the front door of our house on Cedar Ridge Road to hop on my orange 3-speed bike with the banana seat, to ride down the neighborhood road to see if I could find anybody out and about.
I wonder how fit I would be right now if I had started eating smart and doing strength exercises for life, back then. Heck, for all the healthy things I do do, I still don’t eat as well as I should, nor have I ever done regular strength exercising.
Not that any of that would do anything to slow down the rate of my graying hair.
Time passes slow, and time passes oh-so-fast.
For Elysa
Many times I have voiced the insight that my children have taught me more about myself than I ever expected to learn. Try as I did to figure out a way to instill what little wisdom I was able, while also granting them a healthy amount of independence, I never really felt like I was accomplishing a laudable level of fathering. Too much? Too little? Probably most parents share that feeling.
From my early memories of holding baby Elysa while we both watched ice hockey on television (she cried when play was suspended between periods) and the time she guffawed with genuine total body laughter over my silliness with the jack-in-the-box toy, to the difficult days when I didn’t know what to say to the adolescent she had become and she didn’t know what to say to me, we have forged all the firsts. Every time she faces something with me for the first time, it is my first time, too. She is my firstborn.
She has never shopped for a house before. I have never had a daughter make an offer on a house before.
I still vividly recall the overwhelming feeling of taking that newborn out of the safety of a hospital and putting her in a car to drive to our home. Soon there is walking, braces on teeth, and school graduations. In the next moment, buying a house.
I don’t always recognize what my lesson is, out of all the adventures you bring to my life, my dear, but I can tell you that each and every one is precious as can be. Good luck with this latest endeavor. I expect there will be plenty for both of us to learn.
Finding Puffin
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.
Relative Something 