Birthday Thoughts

If my dad were still alive, it would have been his birthday today-- he would have been 90.

There are some people you meet whom it's difficult to picture as "old," ever. My dad was one of those people. He actually dies shortly after my 18th birthday, so I never got to know him much "as an adult," but I still struggle to visualize him as "old."

Other people it's easy to picture as "old." In fact, there are people walking around out there who may be biologically in their 30's, but they are already old. There's a lot ot be said for that old truism "Age is a state of mind."

Memories are often a source of inspiration for me. Perhaps not directly... but I send up thinking about things that happened in a distant past, and then I move onto "I wonder where they/it is now?" and then research with Google follows... and along the way I end up getting distracted into various sidetracks and rabbit holes... and then a new idea builds from there. Or-- at least-- old ideas get turned over and looked at from new angles.

My dad was a corporate executive, and most of the time it struck me that he was pretty much a "thinking" (rather than "artistic") type of person... that said. he did find some creative expression in restoring old furniture and paintings. In some ways, I think he would have really liked to be a "Creative Slacker," but he grew up during a time-- and in a family-- where entertaining such thoughts were pretty much unthinkable.

Words from a Spanish Bedroom

I went back to Spain, last month.

Even though I am actually Danish, I spent my teen years in Spain, after my mother entered a relationship with a semi-retired Englishman who had put down roots in the south of Spain.

Last month-- for the first time in several years-- I went to Spain to visit my mom and stepdad. It was a strange experience because it is so long since I have been there. My parents lived in Phoenix for seven months of the year till 2005, and this is the first time I have gone to Spain to see them, since they've moved back there.

The point of bringing this up is that I pretty much "learned to write," when we moved to Spain. At the very least, it was the time when I started being serious about keeping a journal and writing "observations" about what was going on around me. I would buy these big fat red journal books and write all sorts of things in them. I was 14, at the time... and when I think back on those days, one of the primary reasons I would write so much was that I had very little else to do. We lived in a retirement area, and there were very few other people my age around... except 10 miles away.

The Spain of today looks nothing like the Spain of my teen years. I could as well be on the coast in Southern California, as Spain. But even so, it still has the same "deadness" I felt, when I was a kid... this sense that all the people around me were there mostly "waiting to die."

Writing was an "escape" of sorts. It was a ways to visualize-- through words on a page-- and "experience" the kind of growing up I was not experiencing. Maybe that sounds sad or depressing, but I was actually pretty hopeful, in its own way...