I started a journal writing two days ago that isn't finished yet... but I'll bet back to it and post it early this week. The writing is the result of remembrances and emotions churned up inside me as I reconnect with places and people from fifty to sixty years ago. Today I talked with a fellow who was a student of mine forty-nine years ago. I remember him well. He was bright... and earnest when he was seventeen. I can see that he is still bright... and earnest. After university and medical school he came back to his home town to spend his life doing earnestly what he had been trained to do.
I thought about him as I rode my bicycle today out toward a little range of hills people here like to call the shortest range of mountains in the world. I don't know if that's true or not. I climbed all over the Sutter Buttes when I was an adolescent, and I've been wondering today if that boy who became a surgeon after being a kid in my class ever climbed those mountains... and if he didn't, why not? ... and if he did, what was he thinking as he scrambled up the dry sides of the hills. Did he long, as I did, to find out if the world beyond out valley would be a better place to live than here... and did he come back to practice medicine here because he decided this is definitely the best place on earth live brightly and earnestly? I wonder.
I thought about him as I rode my bicycle today out toward a little range of hills people here like to call the shortest range of mountains in the world. I don't know if that's true or not. I climbed all over the Sutter Buttes when I was an adolescent, and I've been wondering today if that boy who became a surgeon after being a kid in my class ever climbed those mountains... and if he didn't, why not? ... and if he did, what was he thinking as he scrambled up the dry sides of the hills. Did he long, as I did, to find out if the world beyond out valley would be a better place to live than here... and did he come back to practice medicine here because he decided this is definitely the best place on earth live brightly and earnestly? I wonder.
2 comments:
What memories! When I was a kid, my brothers and I climbed West Butte. When I was in Boy Scouts, we climbed North Butte in a cold, winter rain storm. When I was in high school, John McCarthy, David Clay and I climbed South Butte on a dreary day that ended with another cold, winter rain storm. I am not sure about East Butte. It must have become lost in my memory if I ever climbed it. Or maybe it was so much smaller, it didn't count. Or, maybe it doesn't exist.
David J.
Wherever a kid grows up, if his/her environment was positive, their memory is warm and friendly toward their home base; it's their everlasting home. And in most instances, it's good to go home, again. Stay safe, my friend. Ben
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