This past week, I got involved in one of those projects that keeps your surface mind occupied but gives you time to remember, and daydream, and ponder. Really, it worked like a time machine. I had all these clippings that had sat in my file cabinet, literally for decades. Editorials, columns, book reviews, that I wrote for the Virginian-Pilot between 1986 and 1990. A few news stories, plus a few guest columns thereafter. For some reason, I got the idea to put them into 3-ring binders. (Why? I don’t know, but I’m used to doing things without knowing why. I generally find out eventually.)
This process involved sorting them by date, dating them and trimming the margins where necessary, and fitting them into sheet protectors after inserting blank pages to serve as backing. A lot of fairly mindless work, and inextricably part of it, a lot of glancing back at all the stuff I had written over those years, which of course gave me glimpses of a version of myself nearly 40 years younger than today.
Then, having accomplished that, I decided to do the same thing to my folder of columns I had written for the shopper paper I was co-owner of, called Down Jersey, back in 1976-1979. The same mindless work, the same glimpses of a younger version of me. And as I performed these mechanical tasks, I realized a couple of things that I had surely always known, but that had never before come front and center. One is internal, the other external.
Disconnect
The internal factor. Those clippings from 40 and almost 50 years ago showed me how very different my life was then. But how to make it clear?
It isn’t merely a matter of what I said or didn’t say, did or didn’t do. It’s deeper than that. It would be closer to say that my life was divided, rather than whole. In a sense, I was two different people. My internal and external concerns were almost entirely disconnected.
I see it in the clippings. For Down Jersey, I wrote a column called “An Eye on Politics,” later renamed “An Eye on Events.” So much attention to politics! Politics as a game, politics as the conflict of individual ambitions, politics as the forming of policies. Sometimes I wrote of interpersonal rivalries, drawing on not only press reports, but also conversations with the players and observers. As a former newsman, former candidate, former congressional assistant, I had a fairly unique vantage point, and as a columnist even for a small and obscure weekly, I had good access, as well.
Naturally, everything I wrote was suffused with whatever I knew of the relevant history, whether I was discussing the Panama Canal treaty, or nuclear power, or the energy crisis. All well and good, and although I didn’t know as much as I thought I did, probably, as Will Rogers said about experts, my guess was likely to be as good as anybody else’s. plus, I did know some things, and I was a good writer. (For instance, I also wrote a column I called “Friends I’ve Never Met,” about favorite authors and their books.)
But as I glanced at these columns, I was surprised to remember how much thought I gave to such things in those days. It isn’t like I was writing these things out of duty, or as a front. I was interested; I thought it was important.
Another part of me did not care about such things. That part responded to Thoreau, and Jung, and Wilson, and Cayce. That part remembered the larger world that mescaline had showed me. It remembered the things I knew, not knowing how I knew. It felt that big changes were coming, and needed to come. It yearned to be expressed, and nourished – and I had no idea how to do it.
The years between 1970 and 1987 took a long, long time to pass.
Rescues
The external factor. I realized that three times in my life up to 1987 I had so snarled any possible career path by decisions that were internally motivated but were inexplicable to others, that it would have taken a miracle to salvage things. and the miracle arrived.
First, I had graduated from college without ever having given a moment’s thought to how I would turn a college degree into a career.
Second, I had thrown away the career as professional librarian that I could have had, with no idea what to do after the end of the Congressional primary that I had looked forward to for several years.
Third, I was stuck in the computer-programming wilderness, with no idea how to get out, but with the rug being pulled from under my feet (because I did not know how to do the job for the latest employer I had jumped to).
In each case, I was rescued, more or less in the nick of time.
- 1969. Vineland Times-Journal editor and publisher Ben Leuchter hired me as a news reporter on the strength of a piece I sent him about the Washington, D.C. riots of April, 1968. This job served as transition from college to life-after-college. It was a long way form the glass factory.
- 1974. Bill Hughes hired me to help with his Fall campaign for Congress, and, after he won, hired me as one of his representatives in the congressional district. A good job that I could do well; a steady though not excessive salary with which I could pay a mortgage and support a wife and child; a stable platform that could move me toward a political career, if I decided I wanted one.
- 1986. Bill Wood hired me as an Associate Editor (editorial writer) for the Norfolk, Va. Virginian-Pilot on the strength of editorial and columns I had written for Down Jersey a few years earlier. The Pilot provided me the platform from which to discuss the Higher Self Seminar, and thus be introduced to the New Age community of the Hampton Roads area.
(There would be other rescues, most notably by Bob Friedman in 1989 and Ed Carter in 1990, but this takes us beyond the Shirley MacLaine seminar.)
Each of these men had his own reasons for the rescue, but I feel that in each case, one could see the universe saying, “Okay, good listening. Keep the faith; we won’t lead you out into the desert and abandon you.”
It was good to know, first-hand, that this could be relied on. It was not the least of the changes that brought me from what I was to what I am.