It's What's Inside

The first thing that occurs to me is this: With fifty years of pop music in my head, couldn't I do better than Flock of Seagulls? Today I begin the second half of my first century on this planet. The first five decades have been quite eventful, but a lot of the major advances have occurred over the past two. It was on my thirtieth birthday that I struck out from my childhood home and moved to California where I started up my own household, complete with wife, son and dog. I also sprouted a career in education. It makes sense that what I identify as me comes as a result of what I have done with myself over the past twenty years, but I wasn't always going to be a teacher in Northern California.
Way back when, I was going to make monster movies. Director, makeup artist, key grip, I wasn't particular. When I was ten I was aware that a great many of the films I was watching on Creature Features were made in Hollywood. It did not occur to me that to pursue this dream I might have to leave the thin air and safe haven of Boulder, Colorado. This could be why, when I finally chose a major in college, I picked something that might allow me to freelance wherever I might find a typewriter. I could submit manuscripts from anywhere in the world that had a post office, or one of those newfangled fax machines. Being a writer would allow me to hole up anywhere, even if that anywhere happened to be just a few short miles from the home in which I grew up.
I still write. You can probably see that. I just never got my short story collection or book of poems sold to the publisher that would pay me exorbitantly for my clever three page ramblings or my twelve-line free verse. I needed a job. And I had them. I learned that my greatest talent was my ability for following directions. It is quite a marketable skill, as it turns out, allowing me to rise to the relative pinnacles of fast food, furniture installation and warehouse management. I studied none of these trades in school. I got those jobs because I could follow directions.
I learned how to do that when I was even younger than ten. All those teachers at Columbine Elementary were preparing me for a life that would eventually bring me back to a classroom much like the one that I left. And my parents taught me before that. And during that. My father gave me the gift of stories that had a beginning, middle and an end. My mother gave me the gift of literature and film on which I built so much of the rest of my life. My brothers sat on either side of me, giving me daily reminders of what was to come and what had just passed. Through all of those years there was music: My father's silly songs, my mother's opera, my older brother's Beatles, my younger brother's Pixies. And everyone who ever said, "Have you heard...?"
I heard Grateful Dead in the back room of Arby's and in the Bookpeople warehouse, but it never quite stuck. I heard Rush on cassette in high school, but it wasn't until I was thirty that it connected. I've had a head full of musical theater for all these years and now I have a wife who writes her own. My son told me just the other day that "Sweet Emotion" is a great driving song, even though he knows that it can lead to speeding tickets. The Pink Floyd my older brother bought for me on vinyl that he got around to making sure was one of the first CDs I owned as well still haunts me. The Bruce Springsteen songs that made me smile and carried me through the loss of a best friend and the birth of my son. It's all still in there, rattling around. So why am I humming Flock of Seagulls?