Leaving a trace in Daydreaming on the Porch

I often think about some of the jobs I ‘ve had over the years, googling the names of various newspapers and organizations I have been a part of, seeing what came up, if anything much at all, and pondering a dilemma I have been trying to solve for some time now. More on that shortly.

I seem to do this a good bit now that I’m retired — recalling in quiet moments the jobs I’ve held and the people I came to know at those jobs. This takes on added significance for me because I don’t have a family of my own, and, for better or worse, the people I have worked with became, in a sense, surrgoate families. I developed, as a consequence of this, some very strong bonds and friendships with co-workers, including at my last job from which I retired in 2017. Additionally, I realize my life has definitively crossed the threshold of old age, unbelievably. In this final stage of this life, I tend to want to re-assess the good and bad of of those jobs, the towns I lived in, the employers I had, and the co-workers who became very special friends..

Not having had many close friends outside of work, my jobs have always taken on a very important role in my life. Just as a diary or journal is a record of one’s life and thoughts at particular moments in time, so, too, accomplishments on the job are a record of a period of time in one’s personal chronology.

For years, my jobs entailed reporting, writing and editing at small community newspapers. I accumulated a considerable body of published writing and photography, but unfortunately it all seems irretrievable since I didn’t save most of my clippings and writings from those days. There are folders of clippings in boxes in the closet, but it’s not like being able to see the entire newspaper. The only way to do that would be to go to the libraries and historical societies in those towns and view the newspapers in bound volumes or on microfilm. I don’t think the newspapers I worked at have had their issues digitized. I could be wrong, but they were very small newspapers, consequential only to the towns and counties they served, but which have always been integral primary sources of local history, exceedingly valuable to historians. So I’m glad I was able to leave a trace of myself there, having contributed to the written record of a few municipalities for a brief period of time.

Here’s the hard part. While the majority of my experiences in two of the towns were positive and life enhancing, I also experienced events in both places that left lasting scars emotionally. Suffice it to say, the memories are powerful enough so that after many years, I still have not been back to revisit and look at those old issues of the newspapers I worked so hard on, or to even drive around and reminisce and look at old, familiar landmarks in those towns which are only a hundred or so mules from where I’ve lived for the past 25 years. And I only lived in each place about a year and a half.

As the years continue to pass, however, I think about how I can get additional closure on those events from 30 and 40 years ago while avoiding the unnecessary dredging up of old, bad memories. A part of my life was invested in those towns and the question I pose is, “Do I need to try to further overcome my reluctance to revisit the past in those places when so much that transpired there was good and positive, or do I just let it be, leave well enough alone and rely only on the memories and clippings I have? I can’t seem to escape from those two jobs because I had yet another unsettling, recurring dream about one of them just last night.

Or, I might put it this way: How much is gained by physically returning to the places we inhabited in our pasts? What is the real purpose? I am not sure I will or can do this. I have not been back to my home town of New Orleans for more than 26 years, and after the events that transpired during and following Hurricane Katrina, I don’t know how much I want to. But it IS where I grew up, and it IS where my most primal, early memories are rooted. I do miss it very much and hope to visit there before too long.

I have to wonder if returning to the places where we once lived is actually a healthy act of catharsis, renewal and strengthening of ourselves emotionally, or, a painfully self-inflicted wound.