A recent comment has given me pause; apparently, there is some sort of recurring theme to this site, and aside from the obvious, i.e., ME, the comment made me stop and think.
Yes, obviously first and foremost the site is about me, or at least what I’m currently thinking or what it going on in my life. I write about my wife and kids, about being a Dad, living in NJ, but then there is this OTHER stuff: the constant looking in the rear-view mirror to write about events from 20 to 30 or more years ago. Some would believe that this site is not forward-looking enough, the it celebrates the past at the sake of the present. I’ve heard that criticism before, and the recent comment makes me consider it again.
Am I living in the past? I don’t think so; again, there are plenty of posts about the current goings-on of my daily life. No, I think what’s happening here is I write about the past as my way of preserving it; the people and places of those posts are mostly gone from my day-to-day, and I miss them, terribly. Not the events, but the people. I’ve been living now for close to 20 years in the metro-NYC area, over an hour from the friends with whom I shared so many memories, those people who, along with my own family, form the nucleus of the person I am, and I don’t want to let go of them. I write to remember those people, and to maybe try to explain their importance to me in my life. I’m not trying to recapture, repeat or re-live the past, but rather to remember it for what it was, and maybe find new meaning in it now.
For example, I am an erstwhile artist; I used to draw and sketch but I lost my muse many years ago. However, I’d been writing in my spiral bound notebook journals for the most part since 1976, except for a couple of years taken off in the mid-80’s, another few years in the early 90’s, and then essentially 10 years off until I started writing this site in 2004. My journals were much more personal and intimate, as I was truly only writing for myself with no real intention that I would ever share that content with anyone. I did not care too much about sentence structure, or elements of style, but I’ve been very much aware that my blog content is different, and I write with a different perspective. I’ve been writing for a long time now, and my writing has matured. I care about writing for an audience (even if no one ever actually registers to read what I write anyway) that cares about good writing, and I’ve focused my creative energies on becoming a better writer rather than on drawing. Sure, from time to time I am tempted to pick up a sketch pad and my old pencils and draw again, but it just never happens., not out of lack of interest but more out of lack of time and inspiration. I do feel that one day, I will get the chance to sit with my kids and draw something, again, and perhaps inspire something in them to take forward and find their own muses, but will that then mean that I would be living in the past, doing something that I used to do 30 years ago? There is no doubt that I have lived and learned, grown and matured, since those days; should I deny my self, my talents, my interests, from my children and my friends, old and new, out of some perceived notion that I have not grown or moved on? Of course not!
Does that make sense?