Worlds within worlds in Daydreaming on the Porch

I’ve been in the mood for digging back into the past today, having had a day off from work and a few rare and precious hours to myself to think and reminisce as I went through some folders stuffed with all kinds of papers, lesson plan books, graded essays and literature quizzes from my teaching days 35 years ago. It seems unreal sometimes but without those bulging folders of memorabilia I’d have forgotten and not been able to retrieve so many memories from my past. Just a few minutes ago, I finished going through a folder with clippings of newspaper stories and columns from my days as a reporter and editor. I was reading some of the stories, too, and thought to myself, “Wow, those were pretty well-written stories.” And I realized how grateful I am to have been able to do something I loved — work at small-town newspaper and interview and write about all kinds of interesting people, events and subjects. For years I wrote weekly columns, starting in 1975 and continuing off and on until my last newspaper editor job in 1991. I’ve saved a lot of them but not all. It made me feel good tonight looking at those old yellowed newspaper clippings. I wouldn’t trade that experience for anything.

In addition to those folders holding memories from when I taught school and wrote for newspapers, there are many folders of emails that I printed out from the period 1997 to 2002 when I was utterly entranced by and absorbed into the worlds of communication the newly created World Wide Web and Internet were opening up back in those days in the mid to late 90s beyond. I never wrote many letters, just lots of short notes and such in the days before email, but once email and instant messaging and chatting were possible, I was wholly sucked into that also. I used to print out selected transcripts from IM conversations and I look back at the volume of that plus the emails and marvel that I was so outgoing when before I had very few friends or social outlets, just a few good friends, and now I think that’s all that really matters. Instant communication over the Internet chagned everything. Today, all that is over with and I rarely ever even email. I do a little bit of texting but that’s about it.

Finally, there’s another kind of memorabilia I hold onto and those include a wide variety of newspaper and magazine articles and clippings that I’ve read over the years and wanted to save. I have folders marked with certain years that were memorable for various reasons, such as my folder of clippings from 1992-93 when I lived in the Pacific Northwest in a small city north of Seattle. I have file boxes stuffed with these kinds of clippings. When I pick up one at random from a tightly packed plastic file box, I never know for sure what I’ll come up with, but there’s always a reason or story attached to the clipping, photo or artwork. I’m a packrat anyway, so it’s very natural that i would have accumulated those clippings over many years, that plus the fact that I love magazines and have bought and subscribed to dozens of publications over the past 40 years or so since college. Today, I still subscribe to quite a few magazines and I save certain photos and stories in three-ring binders. I was filling one of those binders earlier today. Sure, I probably should throw away much of this “stuff,” but I can’t. Those collected clippings tell my story through revealing glimpses of my many interests as much or more than my rather voluminous online journal writing over the past 15 years.

A few weeks ago, I pulled an amazing bit of magazine artwork from a folder. I didn’t have any idea what it was because I just didn’t study it that hard in the past for clues as to what it was about. But tonight I Googled the name “Caramoor,” which is in the illustration, and discovered it is apparently an artist’s dreamlike evocation of the Caramoor Center for Music and the Arts in New York State (www.caramoor.org). How fascinating! It never occurred to me to research that name before, frankly, and the illustration is probably from the 1980s or earlier, so it’s not like I could have just put the name in Google back then. This is a perfect example of the kind of esoteric or unusual thing I might save from a magazine I’m getting ready to recycle. I took a picture of the illustration to share here. What a beautiful, peaceful, magical world one enters when viewing this scene. It has a dreamlike quality and portrays an event and place I only wish I could have dreamed about. From a folder of memorabilia, another place, another time is revealed, a place that’s as real as anything I could photograph in this earthly plane. And, it turns out, it is indeed quite a real place, one that I’d never heard of before and would love to visit some day. What a discovery tonight.

Last updated September 26, 2016