Month: February 2021

Catching Up

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One of the most exciting aspects of reconnecting with friends has been to discover what they are doing now. While Facebook has been a great resource to find and reestablish friendships from years ago, I’ve discovered it’s not the only way to do that.

Recently I found an old college roommate (old as in the sense, from years ago!) while searching online for someone else. Google returned a vast array of individuals with the same name as my search; when I cross-referenced a few of them through LinkedIn I was surprised at who I had found. I wrote about reconnecting and catching up with John last week (here). Since then we’ve done a deeper dive and spoken on the phone, he refreshing my fading memory and sketching in more details of his life now.

Another friend from my time in the service, US Army 83-86, moved back to the Pacific Northwest upon retiring from the Army. I follow him on Instagram and was encouraged to see that he and his wife have started a podcast primarily focused on travel and the adventures of a blended family. More power to them! Just as the internet has allowed for a wider audience for writers, it has also opened up the broadcast medium to more voices speaking from their own experiences. Take a listen here https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/lifetrek/id1553717951

Last year I had plans to join my fellow high school graduates to celebrate our 50th Reunion. While those plans were cancelled due to Covid-19, I was able to reconnect with a number of friends thru the Facebook Group one of them had set up for a previous reunion. Catching up online, looking at pictures of children ( and grandchildren!) was itself a small consolation for missing out. And truthfully, we didn’t get fingerprints all over the photo albums that inevitably get passed around. 

Last year I spent some time searching online for information about a Nevada artist, one of whose paintings my parents used to own. When I came across a photo of his painting on a website devoted to Western artists, I was intrigued. It had been used to illustrate an article, a review of a new book comparing the lives of two prominent Nevada artists, one an author, the other a painter. I found the book on Amazon and ordered it; read it; loved it. The book’s author had moved to Reno, my hometown, so I tracked him down and shot off a letter to him. I was agreeably surprised to receive a reply. Anthony noted that he has a new book to be published this spring on another Western artist from the same time period and that he would alert me as to the date. A nice touchstone with an important part of my distant past.

Filing box with old cards
Paper filing card system.

Last year we had a mobile shredding service come out and destroy dozens of boxes of old business records, files and notes on people, some of whom I know have passed on. But what of the rest? What has become of some of these names in files from decades ago? What of their families, their children? Where are they all now? And what about us, have you gotten in touch with someone from your past? No guarantees but it is nice to see how some stories have turned out years later, when perhaps we had only seen the first chapter.

Long Ago

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Last week I went for a walk in the woods behind our house. It had snowed most of the day before but now people were out walking their dogs, sledding down the hill, enjoying the cold air and the opportunity to be outdoors. Much of the trail had already been traveled by the neighbors, deep ruts where sets of footprints overlapped others. I stepped aside from the path in order to walk through the undisturbed snow. After some time I turned around and set back home and was startled to see rather large shoe prints in the snow where I had expected there would be none. Strange. And then it occurred to me that what I was seeing were the familiar waffle patterns made by my own shoes. I was retreading the familiar and seeing it from a new perspective.


Long ago, a very long time ago, I thought I had my future planned out. Through junior high, high school, and on into college I had taken art classes in preparation for a career in “Art.” Still life drawing, life drawing, color wheels and painting, printmaking and sculpture were all classes I loved and excelled in. My fabric sculpture class? Not so much, I dropped out after a week. 

Art history classes each semester, trips to local and regional art museums, and then membership in a co-op art gallery where I was privileged to exhibit my drawings and small watercolors along with other members of the gallery on a monthly basis all helped to confirm my strong desire to make a living in the art world.

Three years after graduating with a degree in fine arts (painting) I moved to San Diego and took what I thought would be a temporary job in a silkscreen production company. And for the next 43 years I created…no art. A variety of jobs ensued, a lifelong career in graphic production, trade show and museum exhibits. But no art.

Retired now, I am slowly returning to my first-avowed vocation. I’ve been greatly encouraged lately by the artwork of a young friend, a businessman actually who really shouldn’t have time to pursue his art, but does. Managing to find time to paint, raise a family, and lead a business, Tyler’s efforts have inspired me to take up again what I thought I had lost years ago. View some of his art online here https://www.tylergeel.com/

Last week while searching online for friends from “the good old days,” I came across a former roommate from college. John had taken a turn in his career too, after college. While I had assumed he would end up in politics or perhaps with a law degree, he eventually ended up as an artist and gallery owner. You can see his work here https://studiojomac.com/

I mention this because at one point in time we each worked for the same company, went to the same university; though at that time we pursued vastly different career goals, yet only one of us ended up with the life I thought I had wanted. Looking back now with the benefit of age, I wonder—was it many small decisions that resulted in such different outcomes? Or was there one defining moment, a fork in the road as it were, and here we are today? Can we retrace our steps, perhaps even find our way back and walk for awhile down the untrod path? Proverbs 16:9 says “The heart of man plans his way, but the LORD establishes his steps.”

Robert Frost has a lovely poem along these lines. 

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

I Missed It

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This past Christmas I drove out to our local Target to pick up a new Christmas CD for the wife. No luck. I drove over to Best Buy, home of everything electronic, and was surprised by how much they had…changed. The vast rows of CDs and DVDs—which, along with the equipment to play them, had once been a major part of the store—were gone. Somehow I had missed a major change in the cultural landscape. 

Though I haven’t  been a big consumer of music on CD, still I feel I’ve done my part to keep the music industry running, often picking up a couple of CDs for the holidays or gifts for birthdays. The same for DVDs, purchasing a few every year. When the collectors edition of Star Wars came out on DVD, I picked up a copy along with The Lord of the Rings (and the Hobbit!). I’ve added to my James Bond collection all of the Daniel Craig movies as they came out. The same with Batman and of course The Avengers. Building my audio video library piece by piece through the years, I was surprised by how much we had when it came time to pack and move to our new place two years ago.

Blockbuster sold DVDs as well as rented them.

On March 31, 1997, digital video disc (DVD) video players were first released for sale in the United States. Remember Netflix and their DVDs in a self return mailer? Netflix began in 1997 mailing out DVDs in a self return mailer based on your list of favorites. Within ten years they had switched to a streaming service. Before we switched to Netflix we would stop by our local Blockbuster and grab a few movies for the weekend. Remember Blockbuster? They filed for bankruptcy in 2010. Culture shift. Movies online, no more standing in line.

Best Buy announced that they would be phasing out all CD sales by July 1, 2018. Target was expected to make a similar move, selling CDs only on consignment. The digital disc was destined to be sold in only a few holdouts such as Walmart, smaller record shops, and of course Amazon. I missed this announcement. https://www.digitaltrends.com/features/the-history-of-the-cds-rise-and-fall/

At the same time as the introduction of the CD and DVD, in October 2001 Apple unleashed a little MP3 player known as the iPod. Twenty years later players can be found in many sizes, shapes, and configurations. Best Products lists their top ten players here. With entries from Sony, FiiO, Sandisc, and of course Apple, these little go-anywhere devices offer incredible sound quality, music on demand where and when you want to hear it. They replaced the big boom boxes from my younger days.

Pandora, the internet music streaming service which began in January 2000, has lost ground to an array of new services: Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, SiriusXM, Tidal, and YouTube Music (which replaced Google Play Music) all offer a selection of add-supported or subscription-based music systems that you can stream to your phone, MP3 player, computer or automobile.

So where does that leave us, those folks who are left holding on to boxes full of movies and music CDs from the past couple of decades? What do we do with the remnants of older technology, not quite obsolete but “quaint,” in the same way that my desktop computer was replaced with a smaller, faster laptop? Do we finally adapt and adopt?

Was there a memo? If so, I think I missed it.