Know for sure that this is much longer, and more detailed than absolutely necessary, and I'd appreciate a kindly review -- but any and all constructive criticism is welcome.
Last year I was 39 years old. My son was two years old. I was as old then as my dad was when he died. I was fifteen at the time.
But my story does not start there -- nor is that the end.
I was thinking yesterday that I remember almost nothing of my high school graduation. But when I graduated from Bethel College, in 1992, I recall one friend shouting out my nickname as I walked across the platform. That contrast is entirely emblematic of the difference between the two educational experiences. I was very introverted in high school -- more precisely, I was a wall-flower.
I started to come out of my shell in college. I tried out for the play (oh, I guess I was in the play my senior year of h.s.), I almost joined the declaim team. I had a lot more friends, and sought out a lot more people. Don't misunderstand: I was still an introvert. I vividly recall an instance where I was obliged to attend a party, and I sat quietly on the couch and smiled politely. That was my senior year of college, and I had a roommate who would've made a great used car salesman; he noticed my "discomfort" and said, "wow, Greg, your really a typical geek, aren't you?" (Well, words to that effect. He saw clearly, and said clearly that I was not comfortable in a crowd.) But it was a transition, and not an immediate change.
A few years later, I would join ToastMasters, and learn to enjoy public speaking.
There was a time, shortly after I was done with college, that I was at a birthday of a friend, and got to talking to her dad, someone who knew my life story. He asked how I'd grown and changed -- it had been a few years since he'd seen me. I said, very perceptively, I think, that the person I was at twenty would not recognize the person I was at thirty. If somehow the younger me could have met the older me, the difference would not be just a matter of gradual maturation, so I could've guessed the eventual result, but a radical change, a growth and transformation unexpected. It was almost as if, when my dad died, my emotional and social growth halted, paused. And it seems now as if it took almost a decade before I resumed the process of maturing. Oh, I grew, and learned -- intellectually and physically, I grew, but there are aspects of my personality that did not continue progressing. Somewhere along the line, I took deliberate control of the process. Well, at least I deliberately decided to grow up.
I heard a speaker, addressing parents, primarily, who said that (most) other cultures, besides our own, have a ceremony where a father and/or society at large take a young boy and essentially tells him, by word or deed that, "now you are a man." An example would be a bar mitzvah. Something in what he said made sense to me, so there was an occasion where I took myself out to supper (steak), and said to myself, "self, from this day forward, you are a man." You can laugh at that, or you can recognize some sense in it. Most people have some transition, whether they acknowledge it as such or not -- it may be the first time you have someone address you at "sir" or "ma'am." For some, I think, it is the day they're of legal age to drink -- a poor milestone, to my mind, but a marker nonetheless.
I write those two things together as if they're related -- they occurred around the same time, but neither is the cause of the other. My delayed maturation and my declaration of adulthood. I wanted to record that there was a significant event where I declared myself a man, unrelated to sex. Also, it is important that, to understand me, you know that some aspects of my emotional development were delayed by a decade, but eventually I caught up. But it was not an automatic change. It was an act of volition, as was so many parts of my life.
When I started writing this, I didn't know it would be so much; but I guess since my story has been full so far, and I want to set it down, there are more paragraphs than I thought. Also, I know this will later get edited down to size, but when I was learning to write poetry, my mentor taught me, "first, get it all down, and condense it later." So here it is.
So here I am today, and yesterday my son was born -- three years ago; before that I got married (can it really be seven years?). I've always been one to be where I am now, and not look back. My wife laughs at my memory, because to me, anything that happened last week was "a month ago," and something longer ago than that was "years ago." Some time back, though, we drove near the apartment I was living in while we were dating, and my wife asked if I ever missed it. I never think about such things. Oh, I do feel nostalgia at times, but not in a specific way, like "I wish this or that circumstance were the way it was," but only in the most generic sense of, "things seemed better long ago
There are chapters I've left out -- almost a decade and a half when I lived a bachelor's life; the years my sister and I shared an apartment; my introduction and the eventual expulsion of my step-father from my life (also, a story, or even several, for later!).
But I did live those things -- I was born in Ortonville, MN, and lived there until I went to Bethel. I have lived in Minnesota all my life, from the small town to many of the suburbs of the Minneapolis/St. Paul metropolitan area. I grew up in a "Christian home." I learned to love God early, and have always known that He loves me. I've memorized Scripture, learned the books of the Bible, studied lessons, taught myself the Apostles' Creed (my denomination of origin is Baptist, very non-liturgical, so I wasn't exposed to any formal creeds until much later in life). I've read the Bible from cover to cover, more than once, and still find that I don't know it all. I've meditated on the character of God as expressed by Jesus Christ, and still find that I have a faith that is much smaller than I'd like. My brother and I are both computer programmers, and my sister and I have shared discussions and disagreements for years.
And I have not written much, yet, about the younger brother and sister -- my brother was just here to visit this weekend.
My mom is an incredible woman, who, I now realize, has lived as many lives as I have -- different though they may be -- and more. This last year she survived the death or her own mother, an incredible woman of faith herself -- and the death of a spouse (I'd say, "last year," but I know it was 1985, and I was less than half as old as I am now...), and raising five kids...
My mom doesn't just give guilt trips, she's a registered travel agent. But I owe much of my personality to her, and no small part of my empathy for others, and my faith in God is larger because of her.
No small part of what I could write in my book is due to my family, but I will try not to embarrass them too much, because I am still and will always be part of that family. Read on for the Introduction...
But this has been a "short" introduction to what has been, in reality, a short life, so far.
