An Arc of Time

I wrote about this part of my past too much because I thought about my life a lot. How maudlin can one get--right? It's a thin line I tread somewhere between Carl Jung's individuation and letting go of Zen dualism and ego's self-identification. Each time my memory passes over these years I'm never sure if it is more, or less, accurate. At any rate, it goes, as the piano player says, a little something like this: 

Fifty years ago I drove an old yellow Chevy wagon from Palo Alto, California, to Independence, Missouri. I had recently graduated from High School and worked at a gas station on El Camino Real.  

El Camino was the main drag for the cities strung up and down along the peninsula of the San Francisco Bay.  In Spanish, El Camino Real means "The King's Highway," and where a few hundred years ago Spanish monks traveled on foot from mission to mission, later, kids in hot rods cruised up and down between drive-ins.  Where once monks sowed wildflower seeds as they slowly walked, kids sped up and down, splitting the air with the sounds of hot rod engines pushing spent, polluted gasses through glass-pack mufflers.  I write this to characterize the decade I came from, but, really, nothing has changed. 

It took the Jews 40 years to get to Canaan. It took me just three days to drive from California to Missouri. The construction of the Interstate Highway system had only just begun, so most of the trip along U.S. Route 66 was on two-lane blacktop interrupted by every little town's flashing stoplights and their gas stations and restaurants along the way. To me, it was exciting. It felt like an adventure, and I was happy enough to run away from the entire context of my life so far. 

Then, in what felt like a second lifetime, it took me a dozen years with dozens of jobs and half-baked alliances with others my age to settle down while my pre-frontal cortex fully developed.  It was a process that occurred in fits and starts, and in its own sweet time.

One day I got a job at the local phone company (in an era where there was only one) and shortly afterwards got married and raised a kid. In what felt like a third life-time, I spent about 40 years playing that role to its conclusion. 

Now everything has changed and things over which I have no control have finally asserted themselves. I find, strangely, that I am an old man, at least as judged by certain criteria.  I don't feel like an old man.  I feel like the same person I always was, only with more aches, less hair, and an attitude informed by decades of trying unsuccessfully to impose order on a random universe. 

As you connect the dots you find there is no picture, which is scary, so you leave out some dots and connect others. It means you get to make your own picture, and sometimes it works and sometimes not. That "informed attitude" I mentioned is wisdom,. If you're lucky, you get a little bit.  It's telling you that most things don't matter as much as you thought they did, and the rest you barely noticed. 

I contemplate the firing order
of the small-block Chevy V8 engine