Memories

When a person turns fifty years old, he or she starts to get the idea that maybe you have fewer years in front of you than you do behind you. You start to think about those things you have "always wanted to do." Mortality seems to surround you like a dark cloud. You have elderly parents, ailing friends, you yourself aren't feeling so great and now your boss is even younger than you are. For the first time, even the President of the United States is younger than you are.

When people would ask me what I wanted to do, I said I didn't know. I didn't. There were things I thought I was supposed to want to do, like march for peace and save the world. There were things that maybe I used to want, like an important career. There were things I needed, but maybe didn't really want so much.

I read somewhere that in order to get in touch with what you really want, you should think back to when you were six or seven years old. That's when you are truest to who you are with your wants about your life. I had to think hard. What did I want when I was six or seven? What did I think about then? What were my dreams about, then?

It took me awhile but it sort of came to me in a flash of clarity one day. I immediately dismissed what came because I thought: "Well, so what good does that do me?" But those thoughts of what I dreamed about when I was six or seven wouldn't leave me alone. There were two things that that rather defined me when I was that age -- two things that I thought about and were a big part of my life...at least, in my memory.

The first was reading stories and writing and telling stories. My part-Irish ancestry was a big part of that, I think. The Irish are professional talkers and not many are better at it than they. Kissing the Blarney Stone is no joke. The Bardic tradition in Ireland is of an oral history. The words not only relayed their history, but wrapped that history in a mist of myth and mystery.

No matter the flaws of my family, story telling was integral to who we were. Whether made up or factual, the stories I heard made me appreciate the fine art of spinning a yarn, weaving a tale and making magic. I saw the pictures that were drawn with those words, saw the characters that were being talked about, and felt an immediacy to the generations before me.

My second memory from that age was of horses. I couldn't get enough of them, at least in my imagination. The details of how and where and all that were inconsequential to me then. It was enough to just love them. It had to be. Besides, every self-respecting story probably had a horse or two in it, too. (Oh yes, the Irish certainly have a way with horses, too. Were my however-many drops of Celtic blood speaking to me?)

So, there I was, at fifty, thinking about these two things from my memory: story-telling and horses. Now what was I going to do with that?