The Village Part 4

We live in strange times where we are led to believe all sorts of things that have only half truths or alternatively, half lies. We are led to believe that people on the other side of the globe are engaged in awful activities that somehow conflict with our own way of life. We have these thoughts and then we are led to believe that we live in a world community, a world village. Either thought can be silly or trite. If there are people elsewhere in conflict with our own activities, can not the same be said about us? And how can well over seven billion of us agree on anything specifically the way a village can work through some issue together.

I am as patriotic as they come. I love the country I live in even during the times I am critical of it. I love that we have our laws, and out borders and boundaries. I love that we have the freedom of speech. I also love that I do not agree with most of my countrymen, but I will gladly fight to the death to protect their freedom of speech. To further that thought, I love that there are other countries across the globe filled with people who have their own beliefs and laws and systems of doing things. In some cases, I feel like people deserve more, but I cannot judge an entire system adequately with the lens I see through.

The Village Part 3

When I think about all the places I've ever lived, I cannot think of a single place that was better and for that matter, worse, than any others. Sure, there are merits to every place you go, there are difficulties in every place too. For instance, I lived in Tucson, Arizona in the summer time once. It was a hot miserable place, dead and abandoned in every way. It was a particularly bad time of life for me. I loath the sun, I hate heat. It was the wrong place for a guy like me. However, I did not feel like that at all. Even though there were all sorts of problems for me both externally and internally, I really dug the place. I met wonderful people there. The experience as a whole was the precedent for everything that followed.

There are those times in life when we learn about ourselves. These times always seem to be times of adversity. The things that we learn about ourselves are generally not very good. This is the idea that what doesn't kill us, makes us stronger. This was certainly the case with me in the days of Tucson, Arizona.

The Village Part 2

It was a great many years ago that I came to Longmont, Colorado. I had come because my wife's family lives in Longmont. It seemed like this terrifically exotic place surrounded by the great Rocky Mountains on one side and farmland everywhere else. It was filled with that strange agricultural-industrial ruin you find in small places. There was the defunct and decaying sugar beet refinery. There was still an operational turkey packing plant which did not smell good. There were the rails with the patina of red rust snaking their way through the old warehouses. There was a Main Street, an old neighborhood of stately homes and plenty of open space between.

Longmont, for years captured my imagination. It became this strange fictional backdrop I could reference when I wanted to write a short story. I would put a few people on the streets of my imagined Longmont and give them some sort of missed connection or lost cause to deal with. In my world, I made Longmont to be the quintessential western agricultural center. And since we lived just down the road in Denver, I knew I would be going to Longmont for holidays or parties. Anywhere you go for a party or a holiday is always a great place. Even though Longmont was not a reference point for me and my past, there was something about going to Longmont in those years that made me think of the place as a home or as a sort of home.

The Village

It stretches across decades and time zones and continents. All the places where I have lived and for as long or as short as I have lived there are more than I can recount. As a child, my parents sent me back and forth over state lines from California to Utah. I can only guess at the number of moves I made in those early years. And perhaps the uncertainty of younger years led me to live the vagabond life as an adult.

The longer periods of time, for me, I lived in Denver. I lived in Portland. In the shorter periods of time I called Sacramento, Tucson, New Orleans and rural Vermont home. I have had the opportunity to be in Mexico City, Ansbach Germany, Lisbon Portugal and the most exotic of places in rural Colorado and Oregon for extended periods of time.

What I have learned in these places, was that each was populated with the people and things that I knew there. In each of these places there were certainly bookstores and coffeehouses and bars. There were friends and lovers or the illusion of friends and lovers. There were days and nights in these places when I was alone, because I was always mostly alone, and I was able to think and daydream and recoil and smile. I do not have specific memories but rather the memory of memories.