Front Porch

The world's too big to grasp in one lifetime, to experience all life can offer, to explore all the paths I might follow. At twenty I wanted everything and wanted to do everything and be all that I could be, as the recruiting slogan goes; but approaching sixty-seven I'm learning I need to choose what I still want to try to do and try to avoid, and adjusting my goals accordingly.

Life is so full of wonder and possibility and meaning, to me, that I feel I can never really understand it or control it. I can only deal with a small part of it, can only know and experience a small section of its possibilities in my lifetime. And I seem to need to do so from a central sense of identity and being in time and place. Most advice says we need to live in the present, but my present is very rooted in my past, by choice. If it were not, I fear I might often find this time and place almost intolerably confusing and frighteningly hostile, and I don't know if I could function.

Though I live in 2006, I basically ground myself in the 1940's and 1950's because that's when I was growing up and adjusting to the world. In that sense, I am a product of another time and place. I live in South Florida today, but I am still at heart a Hoosier, small-town boy, where the seasons change and people seem more real to me than here. That's my center. That's when I learned who I was and what I believed, what I liked and what I could do, what I wanted, hoped for, feared and needed to avoid. I still feel more comfortable at Disney MGM studios with its swing era music and art deco streets than I do at Epcot's Innovations and world of tomorrow. I was nurtured and loved in this process by my mom and dad and Roger, my older brother by ten years.

Physically, that center is gone now. My home at 34 W. Park Drive is bulldozed away and paved over for another Bailey's Mortuary parking lot. Mom and Dad are gone, Roger gone, everyone scattered by time and distance and replaced along the way with new people, new homes, new cars, new things and activities in my present world in South Florida.

I have my new family, thank God, who love me and whom I love dearly, at the center of my new life since marriage. But my old center, the child I was, the hopes, dreams, fears and wonder I had then, the desires, goals, beliefs and understanding I had then, the passions, compulsions, mannerisms and habits I had then, remain at my core.

I am still who I was then, even as I have become older, perhaps more cautious, perhaps wiser or smarter, perhaps better in some ways and worse in others. I am still that child trying to gather that world I knew around me. And the cushioned couch I now write from, as I stare out through the sliders at the patio and through the screens to the great world outside, is the same front porch glider I curled up on to draw pictures from then, as I stared out through those front porch screens at the great world outside I saw then.