Monday, July 20, 2020

WHERE AM I AND HOW DID I GET HERE?



By Michael Nettleton 

Into The Great Wide Open
Tom Petty, Jeff Lynne

Eddie waited ‘til he finished high school.
He went to Hollywood, got a tattoo
He met a girl out there with a tattoo too
The future was wide open.

My wife asked me an interesting question the other day.
“When you were a kid, did you ever visualize where life would take you? The things you would do, the places you would live, where you’d end up?”
Keep in mind, when I was a tubby little saxophone player wanna-be living with my folks in tiny timber town Bandon-by-the-Sea, deep thinking wasn’t exactly my strong suit. To be fair to my younger self, sleeping, eating, and being an all-around pain-in-the ass didn’t leave much time for self-reflection.
I mean, I knew I didn’t want to end up like my folks. First of all, they were really, really, old. My dad, at the time was fifty-something. And Mom was in her forties. I was never, never, never, going to be that old. And I’d never wear a Lions Club sweater with a caption that read The Sons of the Beaches like Pop. Talk about unhip. I also had a feeling that I’d leave that one horse town and go somewhere really urban, really sophisticated, really hip and groovy. Like Coos Bay. Or maybe, in the wildest stretches of my imagination, Tillamook.

They moved into a place they both could afford
He found a night club, he could work at the door
She had a guitar and she taught him some chords
The sky was the limit

Well, I’m seventy-one now, kinda creaky and crabby and I’ve been lucky enough to have had my share of adventures. Stumbling into a career that turned me into a radio gypsy, I’ve lived in a number of medium sized and big cities, traveled to some fairly exotic locales and with the help of my wife and co-conspirator Carolyn, written half a dozen books, a stage play and a couple of screenplays. (Anybody wanna make a movie? I’ll make you a deal on a script).
Carolyn decided to go to college in Arizona for one primal reason. She was cold and wanted to live somewhere warm. Tucson and the New York Catskills are on opposite ends of the meteorological spectrum. I, on the other hand, started city-hopping based on a voice on the other end of the phone saying “We’ve got a slot open for you. We’ll pay you $50 more a week than you’re making.” I had U-haul on retainer. I didn’t so much live places as hover there.
Facebook is an interesting, frightening, and sometimes repulsive phenomenon. Because of its addictive nature, I’ve reconnected with people from places all up and down my personal timeline. Sometimes communicating with them can evoke a warm smile and trigger expansive memories. At other times I find myself wondering how the two of us ever tolerated each other. As lifestyle, political, and religious ideas get indelibly imprinted on us, we find that our differences sometimes outweigh our common history and one-time fondness for each other.
Recently I heard from a very old friend from high school and college days. He’s retired, living in Florida and seemed happy to reconnect with me. At one point we were very tight, almost brothers. It’s been fifty years since we last saw one another. I fear for what may come: The irreconcilable differences we may discover, the disdain we may harbor for each other’s opinions. Of course, that may just be the creaky, crabby, pessimistic me emerging from my self-imposed social cocoon. Maybe, it will just be two old friends rediscovering one another. Maybe some of the same things will make us smile and laugh as we used to. But I have a niggling fear, impossible to ignore, that the past is never enough to overcome the realities of the present.
Nostalgia’s not what it used to be.

Into the great wide open,
Under them skies so blue.
Out in the great wide open.
A rebel without a clue.


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