To Leave a Legacy in My Wake

By Renee Shay, Harvesting Thought

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None of us, not you, not me, and not a stranger on the street came to the Americas through ordinary lineages.  Our ancestors were all extraordinary human beings, all of them, even more so those who had to endure fates that none of us today could imagine for ourselves.  Those brave souls of the Indigenous and Spaniard cultures who first migrated by way of land bridges to these expansive lands during the monumental evolution of the human species.  Their human pathways are now invisible to our eyes except when we can get a glimpse of the past from space through modern technology.  We can look back at Earth and map out how the continents so closely resemble opposite landscapes that could have once joined together like pieces of a puzzle.  Leaving to our imagination that those pathways now separated by great oceans due to continental shifts over the millenniums, did in fact exist. 

Many of the first humans to arrive to the Americas over the centuries did so through no choice of their own.  As we know in modern time, some arrived here enslaved in chains.  Whether they were curious and wanted to explore more of the planet to see what was out there or whether or not they were forced or intentionally pushed outward to escape overcrowded landscapes filled with disease and scarce resources, the Indigenous, Spaniards, Africans, Europeans, Asian and the Middle Eastern, all of them, sacrificed, fought for survival, took great risks to create a better world for themselves and their families.  That willingness to keep striving for better, filling that hunger, that greatness, which was their hope, which is what they lived for, that is their personal legacy. 

Having so much greatness come to my homeland before me, as a descendant of Irish, German, and French immigrants, I hope I do not live a life that falls short of what they were able to accomplish.  I hope I live a life filled with rising above the failings of my own past and greater than anyone could expect of me, to be a surprise even to myself. 

To leave a legacy in my wake.  I am not talking of a greatness that transcends centuries or am I, is that all that is left?  Of course, who would not want that, on the surface of my ego, that curiosity for greatness is there but reality is too and a life of greatness for oneself that can lead to the best life lived by me, that should be just as noble.  What does that really mean for me, when most all new worlds have been explored and conquered?  Why do I search for something unique, and something not yet encountered?

I have been fascinated by the unexplored since childhood and the reason I found the study of cultural anthropology so interesting in college.  Who would have thought, I sure did not, that I would end up combining English and Anthropology majors when one is hard enough?  They turned out to be accidently complimentary for me, merging the two interests ended up being a good fit while pursuing a Bachelor of Arts degree as they were both topics that kept me engaged.  I will never claim to be a good student, I struggled with education all my life until I found my interests aligning, only then was I able to improve.  A desire to explore the worlds of the world and document the journey so that you can share it with others that would be a dream life.

Every place I step on this planet has been stepped on before.  Even as I walk out with others across Pleasure Point beach of Santa Cruz near sundown on the first day of the 2022 new year in negative king tides to photograph my niece surfing, someone else has no doubt stepped here before just as fascinated as I am by the sea urchins and fish caught in the tide pools.  Someone has made the journey before to the edge of a live reef normally hidden beneath the tides.  How does one explore such a notion of finding your own legacy of a life to leave behind, to live on long after you are gone, a noble and exciting life that you have lived, does it have to be unique? 

To live, not someone else’s life through someone else’s thoughts written down on someone else’s paper that they themselves were driven to memorialize, whether burdened by purging their own truth or wanting to share their inner worlds of fiction risen from the unexplored corners of their brain, but my own unique life, my story, and my contribution to humanity, how do I discover that life?  One such as me who will not leave children, not leave my DNA upon the earth to carry-on and who wants to explore worlds rather than fight her incapacity to sit quiet enough to read about another’s exploration?  One such as me who from an incredibly early age had no desire to sit quietly enough to learn anything.  Who on one occasion, in our tiny Star Prairie Wisconsin Elementary School, was known to have angered a substitute teacher from Mrs. Knutson’s fourth-grade class by joking around with her neighbor boy that the teacher abruptly stopped her lesson, ordered us all to pick a book from the back of the room, return to our desks, sit quietly and read, that girl? 

The boy and I both went to the back bookshelf, elbowing each other as we made our way, while overtly procrastinating and were the last to pick our books and then headed slowly back to sit down.  I intentionally picked a book of poetry, and while I did sit quietly, the substitute teacher observed me flipping through the book and reading from the back of it and not the beginning.  She then came up from behind me, grabbed me by my hair, forcefully pulled me out of my chair and ushered me to the door.  She said, “you do not read a book from the back first!”  Poetry left an impression on me from an early age, I liked its power to disrupt. 

In case you are wondering, it was the seventies, teachers did lay hands on the students, and I assure you that was a mild form of abuse that children experienced in that school.  I never saw my class the rest of the day as I had to then go sit in the Principal Ms. Tobiason’s office while she was busy teaching her third-grade class.  We had the nicest principal, who was my main teacher the year before, who smoked cigarettes and is still remembered as the one who drove a cool yellow car.  Little did the substitute teacher know that day she yanked me out of my chair in her fit of anger toward me, that it was not a punishment to be sent to the principal’s office.

Having my hair pulled was not the worst thing that happened at the hands of others in that school and town.  It was memorable, but not that big of deal considering the other things some of us endured.  I was routinely plagued with attention issues and spent many days fearing recess or going home because classmates, the same ones I had acted up with in class would be waiting outside the school gates, hoping for a chance to beat me up.  I sometimes had to produce excuses to go chat with the aids in the crow’s nest administrative office on the second floor so I could watch to see if anyone was hiding in the grass just outside the school driveway gate.  I did not tell them that was what I was doing though, would make up some other excuse so that I could peer out their windows to see how much longer I had to wait before I made a run for it or if I had to decide to escape out the back of the school and go along the woods and ballpark to get home.  That was even riskier because there would be less chance of an audience if they would catch up with me there.  It was better to go straight out and then cut through the yards to get home because staying out in the open and on the road was dangerous.  I had to avoid the post office steps, two blocks down the hill from the school.  That is where all the older kids spent time together, right in the middle of town on main street, with the best advantage point because they could see in all four directions, and they were even more dangerous than my classmates.  If I did not time it right, meaning left the school too late, then I would be facing double trouble, allowing the older kids enough time to go home, get their snacks, then head out to hang on the steps.  We were all just children, but we were unbelievably mean to each other. 

I was not an innocent victim and not proud of these things, but they do highlight the craziness I experienced as a young child.  I do expect no pity as I did my share of bullying with the same kids who bullied me, and I was the cause of others to fear going home from school too.  We had bullied one kid in our class so badly he developed ulcers and was afraid to come to school.  He missed many days of school and we heard that he was blaming us for it.  That did not go over well with us and when he came back to school, we were going to teach him a lesson.  We waited for him after school and chased him through the woods when he started to run.  The two boys I was with chasing the other kid are the same two boys I had to run from on many occasions.  The one same neighbor boy I got in trouble in class with that resulted in me getting pulled out of my chair, he was one of them.  Now I was running with him and another classmate, who on another occasion, I had picked on and took his red superball away from him.  That resulted in him running away from school that day and then wanting to beat me up.  All of us, bullied and bullies, now chasing this other kid. 

I ran through the woods and out into the clearing of the kid’s backyard.  His mother ran out of the house toward me, yelling, “you kids leave him alone.”  He ran up toward his mother but then suddenly stopped, picked up a baseball bat laying in his yard.  We often left our bats, gloves and balls laying in the yards, so it presented an opportunity for him, and he took it.  He turned back toward me and started running at me with it.  When I turned back toward the woods, I realized the other boys were gone, cowards, it was just me, a mad mother, and a boy with a bat.  As I was running for my life toward the woods the boy realized he could not outrun me, decided instead to just throw the bat at me, hitting me square in the back.  That did not feel so well but I kept running and made it into the woods.  We stopped picking on that kid after that day.

Throughout my adolescence I looked forward more to gym class to show off my tomboy athletic skills which came in handier for me than reading, math or science, or anything else having to do with a formal education.  I remember that I was behind with reading skills so had to take a special class to catch up.  I do not know if that was because of my attention issues associated with an undiagnosed learning disability that was the cause of my inability to keep focused or if it was the anxiety of always staying on guard because of living in that mean small town.  Either way, I had difficulty learning.  All my own teachers from that school, Ronning, Marlett, Emerson, Tobiason, Knutson and Fish, they were great, and I do not have any animosity toward that one substitute teacher, as I know, I was a difficult child.  There were other events at that school despite all the good teachers though that cannot be overlooked as they have had an impression on all of us kids. 

Growing up I would hear the classroom horror stories from my brother, one year older than I, about his nightmare fourth grade teacher, Mr. Thomas (real name omitted).  My brother got in trouble one time in his class, got an answer wrong or was acting up or something, he does not recall the reason now but does recall the punishment of standing at the side of the class by the chalkboard, holding stacks of books outstretched in each arm, until the bell rung.  As if the knowledge from the books would enter his brain through osmosis. 

Stories like that are still being told by his classmates and re-remembered in alumni Facebook posts about the abuse and the trauma they endured, forty plus years later.  Some of those same kids that were abused by that teacher were the meanest in our town, bullies, and abusers themselves, so I have little sympathy for them.  But I do have some for my brother as he was a kind kid and so were some of the innocent witnesses.  They still recount their fear of raising their hands and getting an answer wrong. 

Their posts are fragments of family-like stories you would hear each year during holiday gatherings, learning a little more about them each time.  Another one of the stories recollected again was when this same teacher pushed a kid down in front of the class, repeatedly, would not let him get up.  Someone had tattle-tailed on this boy and said that he had pushed someone down on the playground.  Mr. Thomas’s lesson for the day and every day appeared to be, an eye for an eye.

The most infamous story is about one kid, the brother of the boy who hit me with a bat, experienced the worst abuse in that school that we know about.  The kid had made a thumbtack pad out of the back cover of a notebook, pushing a dozen or more tacks one-way through the pad, then proceeded to put the pad on the teacher’s chair (full disclaimer, could have been another kid’s chair).  He got caught either before or after the person sat on it, no one remembers that.  What was memorable, was the teachers lesson for the day of do onto others and with his usual audience, made the kid stand up in front of the class, pull his shirt up and then thrust the thumbtack pad into the boy’s stomach, hard enough to draw pain, blood and get him fired.  The teacher decided to teach him a lesson by showing all the kids how tacks look, feel and sound going into your skin. 

My brother was a second-row witness to this event and remembers the boy had went around afterward lifting his shirt up and showing off his stomach to anyone who wanted to see again the carnage it had caused.  I remember seeing his stomach shortly afterward on the playground too.  It became one of his badges of honor throughout his childhood.  The truth is, not many of us had pity for this one boy, he was evil.  Him being tacked like a voodoo doll, well, karma.  Guess we did not learn our lesson from this as we would often do the thumbtack joke on other kids and teachers to draw a laugh because we thought it was funny to hear someone yelp shortly after sitting on one.  We all experienced our own karma, not sure that any kid or teacher in that school went without sitting on a thumbtack. 

After we had finished fifth grade in our little satellite school on the hill, we were then bused to the secondary schools as we were part of the larger New Richmond School District.  I had attended some primary school there before moving to Star Prairie, so returning to it by sixth grade was a little easier on me than some of us who never had left their small town for school before.  Many did not assimilate very well, especially those who were at least one year or older than I.  They struggled in school, were not a part of school sports, never pursuing anything enough to break free from their dysfunctional alcoholic home life.  Many were only previously known to the New Richmond students through shared bussing field trip experiences.  They called us through chants on the buses the Star Prairie Dogs and we called them the New Richmond Nerds.  Looking back now, we should have been called the Underdogs, which would have worked too. 

I had adapted quickly back into friendships with familiar faces and sports became my focus through my middle school years, though my small town still had a grip on me.  I would get into trouble by bullying boys, the bullied becomes the bully, who was me.  I would disrupt class and even got suspended once, my father was not too happy about that day.  The funny thing is I liked this one boy that I would throw into the rose bushes every day while we waited to get on our bus that would take us back to our small town.  That is what the older kids did to us, so we would do it to the younger kids, it was a cycle and I thought was harmless fun to initiate the next group.  I had to have a meeting with his mom and my parents in our home.  His mom would do housecleaning for my mom, so you can imagine, it was quite awkward when she asked me why I was picking on her son so much that he was afraid to go to school.  I did not have an answer for her.  I agreed to stop bullying her son and the funny thing is, we eventually became friends and dated some in high school.  I cannot tell you enough how dysfunctional our small town was, and this is only a glimpse of the unsupervised destruction we caused each other.  We had done horrible things and somehow came out the other side of it all as friends, makes no sense to me how that happened.

One regret I still hold today was how me and that same neighbor boy I mentioned earlier, whom I got in trouble with over the poetry book in fourth grade, had routinely both picked on an English teacher in eighth grade until she would cry and leave the room.  We were cruel and would oftentimes take some twisted pride in bringing her to tears by disrupting so much that she was not able to finish her lessons.  It was such a sport for us to disrupt class and see how quickly we could get her to leave the room.  I spent a lot of time in the principal’s office then too which was right next to her class.  Because she was a family friend to his family, I did get the opportunity to apologize to her at his high school graduation party.  Making amends to her does not change the regret today, I own that forever, but I hope it helped her realize it was not about her, it was about me, and gave her some peace with it. 

It is fascinating to me how cruel children can be to teachers and other students and that I fell on both sides of the same coin when it came to bullying or being bullied.  Even the adults lived in between those blurred lines like the one male teacher who tried to embarrass me in the hallway one day by grabbing me, lifting me off the ground and shoving me into a wall, telling me, “It is not lady-like to hit boys.”  I think I had used the push-trip technique on a kid in the hall and the teacher saw me do it.  Seriously, from the one who is manhandling a girl by throwing her to the wall in his fit of rage, he is telling me how to treat boys?  I did not think that was how you would treat a girl; it did not make sense.  I deserved it though and he was trying to wake me up to my own meanness.  Point taken.  I learned to protect that kid from that moment on, defended him from other bullies and we became friends after that.   What an odd way some of us humans have of making friends.

Fast-forward to high school, trouble just double backed on me at every turn.  My education was a trainwreck fueled by partying all the time, the two were so entangled that I am not sure how I graduated through it all.  I left high school with a nagging feeling of being lost at my core, not sure what my future would hold.  I was so tormented because I gave up my connection to sports except skiing in the winter and softball in the summer, had no connection to education and lost some good friendships because having fun with whomever, whenever, became my priority above anything else.  It would have been impossible to carve out a future for myself without an education, but how was I going to accomplish that?  I thought about joining the Air Force as my father did but then rethought that quickly, too many rules.

Some of the prairie dogs, especially the boys, never bothered to finish high school, they were outsiders and eventually just quit.  I was a little more fortunate, our family always seemed one step removed from the others.  Maybe because we had that previous school connection to New Richmond or maybe because my father was an educator before going into business or the fact that our parents had a business there, I am not sure.  I do know, my siblings and I, five brothers and a sister, were routinely beat up or got into fist fights from our first day that we moved to Star Prairie.  It did not take us long to learn that we had to push back on the prairie dog bullies whenever we had the chance.  We would oftentimes ensure we had an audience so we could prove how tough we were.  It did not matter if you were a boy or girl, boys beat up girls, they certainly beat up my siblings and I, day one, and girls beat up boys, no way around it.  It was the way we lived, or should I say, survived.  My family was always more the jocks and nerds at heart than we were ever prairie dogs.  That was the secret to our survival and was the reason we all got as far away from that town as soon as we could.  Education would be our one ticket out, the one very thing that would not be an easy path for me.

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As I look back, I am glad now for eventually identifying more with the nerds than dogs during school, though it did not feel so simple and good growing up.  It is quite the wonder to me that someone like myself would still aspire to do anything so academic as writing.  Me, who had survived growing up in that brutal small town, where most of the kids never went onto graduate from high school and I barely receiving my high school diploma.  Me, who had a habit of tormenting English teachers, that me.  It does make me proud to think about all the degrees that my family had accomplished despite it all.  I am proud of my siblings as everyone of us finished some type of postsecondary education and we have twelve degrees among us seven siblings.  I would say, given all we endured at the hands of some of the bad prairie dogs, we rose above our circumstances well.

My father had drilled into all his seven children that education was important and necessary.  They settled for me being a “C” student at best, enough to get through.  He was an educator and school superintendent prior to running his own business.  My mother was more pragmatic than my father and had told me I could have just as noble of a life by having a job in a factory, if that is what I wanted.  Despite a formal education and with only a high school diploma, my mother raised seven children while successfully running a bar and restaurant business with my father.  She added, of course, you can have a better future with an education, but the choice she said was mine to make and she would be proud of me either way.  I knew I may have to reconsider education after a two-day try at factor work in the local cannery that was one of her first jobs at my age.  I knew then I would be better served following in my father’s footsteps than hers.

My brother, the one a year ahead of me that had the nightmare teacher back in fourth grade, convinced me to join him at the vocational school in town and work on an administrative assistant program.  I had liked learning to type and do some shorthand in high school, why not try it.  So it began, a journey to complete a two-year associate degree program for a girl who did everything she could to stay out of classrooms, now finds herself back in one.  The first year was fun, social, some studying and challenging, and was a new feeling for me to enjoy learning.  My teachers were great, to this day, not sure how they put up with me, but we were making it work.  Going into the fall of my second year, I promised myself that I was going to buckle down and for the first time in my life, figure this education thing out.  Little did I know at the time, I was about to face the most challenging year of my life and how I thought my journey would go, was not the way it went. 

About a month before my second year, I had moved into one of my cousin’s basements, who was also my former track coach in eighth grade, and while helping her clean out her garage, I injured my back lifting some wood.  I thought I could just stretch it out and went for a jog, which made it worse.  This injury was new, I was always very physically fit and never battled an injury quite like it before.  Getting hit with bats in the back, honestly that happened more than once, sprained ankles, soreness from track, skiing, tag football, baseball, softball, or basketball games, bruised from a fight, stupid injuries doing stupid stuff, which healed in a few days, which was the extent of injuries that I had experienced.  With this back injury I was in such pain someone recommended a chiropractor, so I went but left their feeling they hurt me more.  I then went to a doctor; they prescribed a pain medication.  For a girl who partied every chance she could, adding the stress of school and working part-time at a local pizza restaurant, in major physical pain and being prescribed a muscle relaxer, that turned out to be not a good addition to my world.  My mind, body and soul ended up in a war and many things gave way while I watched my goal of completing my first degree fall apart.  The funny thing is, I was never going to be anyone’s secretary.  I just liked to type.

I left school that last semester of my second year to get some help and while trying to turn my life around, that experience almost caused me to end my own life.  My doctor posed one simple question to me, just one, “what do you want out of life?”  Out of the carnage came a dream of studying literature at the University of Minnesota while standing in my hospital room which happened to have a view of the university just over the banks of the Mississippi River.  The irony is not lost on me that all these pivotal moments, some more obvious than others, for the same girl who caused trouble for a substitute teacher in fourth grade over a poetry book and who spent her entire childhood never sitting long enough to read a book cover to cover, wanted a literature-based education and continues to have a call to write.  Despite the educational challenges ahead of me, I pushed forward, started college, and got through my first year.  After that, I moved to California and lived there a few years, continuing to write poetry.  I assimilated straight into the wrong crowd and was soon off my path.  I decided that it was time to get back home to the Midwest and hit a reset button.

My writing had taken on a few forms over the years after that.  It began with believing that poetry was the one form of literature that had no rules, and I liked no rules and having no boundaries in my life, so it fit.  Of course, this was not true as I learned in college, but I did not care.  I disregarded it all and continued to play with words and write down my thoughts that came to me as they made sense to me.  I was also journaling my journey and writing poetry while living in Mexico over a series of winters in my late twenties.  I would journal my inner world because I oftentimes lacked the ability to speak to it aloud.  Then, a switch occurred to another form of writing completely out of a fevered darkness. 

I loved movies, I would watch movies and while sitting there in a dark theater, would think to myself, I could have written this movie.  But nothing developed into a full story enough for me to want to learn how to write a screenplay until this one experience while living in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico.  I had awoken out of a several days fever while locked up in my apartment, recovering from a flu or alcohol poisoning.  I had to let my neighbor friend know that I was sick, as who knows, I could have died there, and no one would have known.  She brought me chicken soup and kept an eye on me to make sure I was still alive over the course of those few days. 

During that sheet drenched fever, my mind started formulating a movie in my head.  I would jot down bits of the story while in and out of consciousness.  This was unexplored territory because I would normally jot down bits and pieces of a poetic rhyme or journal type narrative.  When I woke, I had the framework of a movie in mind that never left from that moment forward.  I could see the movie clearly from the beginning to the end.  My illegible scrolls in my notepad from that were the only writings about the movie for years.  I would pitch the story to anyone who would listen but took me years to finally begin to write it.

All my personal writing took a back seat upon returning to the states after that and returning to the world of academia to finish my degree.  In 2002 I was finally able to check a degree off my list and shortly thereafter, began a career unrelated to anything remotely close to English or Anthropology.  A few months later, I then transferred my job to another city for a promotion within the same business and found I had a lot of leisure time on my hands.  I would reverse commute from the Minneapolis, Minnesota area to the city of St. Cloud, an hour north, work odd hours, sleep in cheap hotels when the weather was too bad to drive back home, or I was too tired.  At one point, I rented a small studio apartment there with the sole purpose of setting it up to only sleep and write, that is where I would begin writing my screenplay.  Although I had a degree in English, I had experienced no teachings on screenwriting. 

To get me started, I decided to first go to Barnes & Noble bookstore and purchase a stack of books on screenwriting, read them all, read a few scripts like Good Will Hunting and Reservoir Dogs to get the basics down, and a way I went.  Creating that writing space in that apartment for those few months, while it was not practical to financially due long-term, it helped me to start and eventually complete my script.  I edited it a few times over the years, copyrighted it and now it collects dust buried somewhere on my computer.  But I did it, goal accomplished, check.

Looking back and forward at the same time is one of life’s most difficult journeys but in my case, transformative.  What then, with all my past, would a written legacy look like if that will be my legacy, and will it be worthy enough for someone else to spend time reading or watching on a screen?  I am that same girl who continued to write poetry through her turbulent late adolescence while battling her own addictions that happen to coincide and then collide with a desperate yearning to discover her path.  Now what, where do I go from here? 

As a deadender on the family tree, do I have a greater responsibility to leave my mark on life that is different than all my siblings who will leave behind their DNA through children who are now having children of their own?  Is it easier for them to wash their hands and say my job is done or harder because they have a greater worry than I of what kind of world they are leaving for their children and their children’s children?

I often wonder if my legacy will be left in the DNA of my thoughts and words that find their way through ink and onto paper?  That notion somehow compels me to continue to write even though I find the process daunting at times.  From my earliest memories, it has been hard to keep my mind focused on one task.  As a child, getting me to sit still to read, to write, impossible, as I had the attention span of a mosquito.  Even though I was fascinated by books I just did not spend much time reading them.  I remember when we would fill out a checklist for Scholastic books we wanted to purchase and one summer after getting our books, we decided to clean out some dusty old neighbor’s garage and play bookstore.  That lasted about two seconds that childhood summer but nonetheless left a memory in my mind for a lifetime.  

Not all my childhood was filled with fighting, I had many great times exploring the outdoors.  I can still stand there in that dust filled room with streaks of sunlight coming through the air, and seeing the large grinding stone wheel, which we did not know what that was at the time, the history just sitting there along with a broom, and our books on a wooden shelf.  I wonder if Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, who is two years younger than I, had the same experience and excitement of buying books in his childhood.  I find some of the richest people in the world get rich by capturing moments of childhood and turning them back on us as adults.  If you do not think Facebook is show & tell from kindergarten or if Amazon did not start out as an online scholastic type book business, or Elon Musk is not just capturing his own fantasies of space to fill those needs for the modern world and Hollywood is not capturing human being’s thirst for connection with each other, adventure or avoidance of pain and death with all the violence and horror films, well then it is you who is the one who is not paying attention.

What adventurous child growing up in the seventy’s did not know of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn?  I am sure I never read all of it in a book, as you know now, I would just read the front and back covers of most books to get to the story lines so I could finish a class assignment and I did not purchase a copy through the school as it was banned.  We went to a play in the Twin Cities or saw it on television, not sure, but I was inspired as it fit into my psyche well.  I remember how it inspired us kids one summer to explore the Apple River with more purpose than previous ones.  The Apple River, which was slingshots throw of a rock from my doorstep was quite smaller than the mighty Mississippi River.  Our imagination did not have to stretch that far as our river in our small town eventually feeds into it via the St. Croix River. 

We could have reached the Mississippi had we built the raft we dreamed about while going through our checklists of what supplies to bring.  We did not have time for a wooden raft this trip, we were going to use inner tubes to get to our destination.  I remember going through a closet in our back porch the night before looking for supplies that I was going to take on our secret adventure the next day.  I remember packing up a green army backpack with peanut butter sandwiches and a wax paper bag full of mom’s homemade chocolate chip cookies, pocketknife, canteen, packet of red book matches from my parent’s restaurant, “The Laurel,” advertised on them, and a flashlight.  I remember also planning to take the green wool army blanket like the kind you would see behind a cowboy’s saddle.  It is amazing the few things that get implanted in our brains for life, this was one of them.

I could swear and spit with the best of the boys and growing up on the river, I could also dream of great adventures on a river raft.  Something odd about that memory was that me, my brother, and that neighbor boy were talking about writing a play and that had inspired us to take the trip.  We used our inner tubes to float the fifty yards or so to get to the island.  The current was fast and if we missed catching an overhung branch on the bank, who knows, we may have found ourselves on our way to the Mississippi.  We were always told we should not go on the river past the Trout Farm, which was not allowed as the water had fast rapids, but I do not recall them worrying about the island, they did not think that we would try getting to it, but we did both at some point.  Not sure we planned our way back that day, who does when you are heading out on an adventure, is that not the point.  We enjoyed what felt like a few hours exploring the island, eating our homemade lunch, and then finding our way back home.  We used the fallen tree that had become a walkway to the island from the other side of town to get back to the shore that day.  We never did write our play, but that little memory and the admiration for Twain’s adventures, still holds.

That same fallen tree that brought us back home that day happened to be the same tree used as a pathway that I walked across with my sister a few summers later when she took me to my first beer party, quite a different journey to the island that night.  We crossed the tree to hang by the fire with older kids, to then leaving the party while trying to keep a kid from passing out on the bridge.  A group of us then made our way up to the school and then to the park, to do more smoking and drinking.  While in the pitch-dark ice rink warming house, I remember we could only see the orange glow of cigarettes.  Cops must have been called because they were looking for us down by the school.  My sister decided it was time to make a run for it as we peeked out the ice rink door and could see the police officers on the back stairway of the school, shining their flashlights.  That night left us with a great memory of running through the moonlit park, into the neighbor’s yard and then down the gravel hill toward home.  That was the first time we were running not from bullies to get back home but from the police.

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If I have a dream that hosts the slightest hint of plausibility, achieving that dream is closer than I think.  Asking myself what is it that I really want out of my time here on planet Earth?  What is it I want to achieve?  Do I have a fear of swimming but want to learn how to do it?  Do I want to pursue my fourth promotion at work or changing my career path altogether?  No, I am not afraid of swimming nor want the next promotion at work, I want something else.  Whatever it is for me, I alone know what that thing is, I no longer need to dig deep into my mind to find that one dream.  That one dream out of all my greatest dreams that lurks in the corner of my mind collecting dust.  Yes, that one.  That one dream that I have kept hidden all these years, even from myself on most days because it is just a dream right, or is it?

For those of us who tend to be the fish out of the waters of life, to use a metaphor here to further my point, I must pay attention here.  Imagine, a dolphin is not going to train to become a famous snowboarder like Shaun White, the 35-year-old American Olympian, who just finished his last professional snowboarding event February 10th at the 2022 Olympics in Beijing, China.  No, that is not based going to be a reality for a dolphin.  Does it seem possible, if mammals were allowed to compete, that a dolphin could be trained for the one hundred meter in swimming?  Those are the dreams I am talking about; those are dreams worth pursuing, the ones in my own lane.

Not everything in life is organic, meaning not everyone is seamlessly born into a particular path nor set on one at such an early age like White that it appears to us observers to be natural for that person.  Often, even from an early age, achieving a dream becomes a lot of dedication, demanding work, training, training and then some training.  I am sure that White, the greatest and most accomplished snowboarder and skateboarder to have lived thus far, was extremely disappointed in himself that he did not take gold home after falling on his last halfpipe run.  Is he still living his dream, of course he is?

He hinted that he had a vision for himself on how his last run would play out in an interview with Craig Melvin, NBC News Today Show, prior to competing in Beijing though he did not share what with us.  After already having competed in five Olympics and taking the gold three times, no doubt he wanted to end on the podium with a gold medal hanging on his neck. 

He talked in the interview about the last gold metal he achieved in the 2018 PyeongChang, South Korea Olympics and how that was already a moment that he was so proud of, the pinnacle of his success.  He says he looks at this fifth Olympic competition as his “bonus” round.  He is foreshadowing in the interview that he wants gold but is not going to say it aloud because he also knows that is a stretch for him at his age to want such a dream.  He is not settling, not giving up, he is only addressing his reality while also, one last time, doing that one thing he loves to do at the highest level he can do it at.  This is what I am talking about when I talk about pursuing my dreams based in an understanding of possibility.

He describes in the interview with Melvin how his whole life he was looked up to as a “superhuman” because he could do so many amazing tricks.  He had been pursuing his dream since a kid and now at 35, he says he is realizing that he is not superhuman, he admits, “I am human,” and admitting that to himself and others is extremely hard.  When he talks of these things now, he is realizing the reality of his dream.  That he can still compete in his sport but that his potential for greatness in his dreams is now behind him though that does not mean he has to stop living a life focused on his dream.  It will now require him to take different paths while still in his lane and he says he is at peace with that.

It is important for me to pursue my own dreams and to not focus so much on the end state but on the actions that it will require me to take to get there.  Outcomes are out of my hands and to really understand them I must learn to separate what the outcome may look like to myself and what I think the outcome should look like to others.  Oftentimes, outcomes are not mutually exclusive.  

I feel as if I have taken the long way around and that has slowed me down.  Maybe like I did when I was a kid, having to use the backdoor of the school to run from the bullies.  When I had to travel a longer distance along the woods through the park to get home did that slow me down or make me a faster runner?  I did not take the traditional path of becoming a writer but did that path lead me to more adventures to write about, time will tell.  I will never be as great as the greatest, but I do believe I can live within my dream, even if it is in small ways here and there, if I keep working at it.  Even the greatest at something, like White, can recognize their limitations within their dreams at some point.  It might look quite different than what they had imagined as they walk their path, nonetheless, they achieved their dream.  Dreaming my way to achieving my dream is possible if I dedicate myself to taking the time to discover just what it is that I want, taking the time to learn, to study, to train, to ask for help along the way, to do whatever I must do to set myself on the path to achieving it.  I must act, not just read about how someone else did it in someone else’s book. 

While pursuing my dreams it is important to remind myself to let go of the outcome, I cannot control that, too many variables that could change the direction within it.  I can let that go, focus on doing the right things I need to do to get there.  Telling on myself aloud does help to keep me motivated.  I am considering taking a continued education course on screenwriting to assist me with setting up my next screenplay.  I am excited about that and hope I can get into the class when I attempt to register for it next week.  I have already started reading the two books associated with the class.  Me, the same kid who never liked reading a book cover to cover buys the books for a course she has yet to register for.  Sometimes I do things that even surprise myself and that is a good thing.  What my dream looks like to me, that is up to me and will no doubt change over time.  I must leave the rest up to the universe to decide what it will look like to others.  Greatness is not something that just happens, no matter what it may look like to the outside observer, no one is born with it.  To leave a legacy in my wake is in the waves I have made along my way.  I am looking forward to my next writing adventure, I cannot wait to see where this path will take me.