Trying to make sense of the past in Daydreaming on the Porch

One of the inevitabilities of aging, for me at least, has been a tendency in my early 60s to more often than ever revisit places, times, events and memories of schools, jobs and people I knew and experienced 20, 30, 40 or more years ago. The other night I went through my entire high school yearbook from 1969, wincing at some of the comments people wrote in the back but realizing how true some of them were.. really revealing. Was I that person staring back at me in youthful innocence from the pages of that ancient book which also, strangely, looks as fresh and new as when I first got it? I’ve been traveling around the city where I grew up, New Orleans, via Google Street, entranced by all the familiar sights, the architecture, the grand live oaks, the street cars on St. Charles Avenue, my own block in Algiers, all of which makes things seem as if time has stood still. How many wretchedly hot and miserable summers did I push the family lawnmower and edger up and down the sidewalk to my lawn customers whose yards I faithfully kept up for five years, in that grueling New Orleans heat? Why? Well, I made a bit of money to save for college and spend on my books and stamp collection. I felt a sense of responsibility and it “built character” as they say.

New Orleans has so many memories for me that I could endlessly revisit the place in my recollections, if not in my dreams. I haven’t been back in 20 years, though. As many bad times as I had there growing up, I still miss it very much. But foolishly, though, I also miss what could have been. I have regrets. Why didn’t I go to the French Quarter and have fun like others my age? Why didn’t I have more friends? Why did I hang around the house so much?

I travel back in the past to 1973, the year I graduated from college. I revisit memories of my first newspaper job two years later in Columbia, South Carolina, and the good friends I made in that city. I think of all the great times I had in my 20s in Columbia when I was young and the world was mine to have and life stretched out for years and years into some exciting, unknowable but definite future. Life was good.

Then came the major personal and professional setbacks and failures in 1978, 1983 and 1986 and 1989. Horrible situations. A whole decade of setbacks and failures. I took to the open highway to escape, making a series of cross country trips year after year in the 80s in between failed jobs and graduate schools. Those road trips were my narcotic, my drug.

I remember a place where I lived and taught school in Mississippi. It was 1985-1987. I was 35, 36. Life still loomed large ahead of me with great possibility if only I could find what it was I was supposed to do. It sure wasn’t teaching in that school. To escape the pain of the bad times there, I again got on the road and drove and drove, deep into the countryside where everything was quiet, peaceful and rural. I dreamed of other places and new beginnings. I did that a lot in that decade.

For five more years I floundered until in 1994 I finally came out of the tunnel and the light appeared, and a job came to me that I was not looking for or expecting. I have been there for almost 20 years now. It’s 2014. I’m 63 years old. I am thinking about retirement. I can hardly believe I just wrote that. Life is entering its final stage. I’m still trying to figure out why I am the person I am today. Could things have been different? No, absolutely not. What happened to me was going to happen. It’s was inevitable. It’s made me the person I am now. I’m living the final chapters now.

Last updated September 19, 2014