Getting Lost

July 11, 2009 at 3:40 pm (Do It, Read It, Think About It)
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youarehere

Sometimes it is good to get lost.

I’m not what could be considered a serious hiker. Maybe a serious walker. My knees don’t allow the hiking I once was able to do. I can think of two times that I was in the woods and got lost. Actually, I can think of many more times that I did not know where I was at some point, but that’s not the same thing.

In one case, I was walking and did not time my leaving very well with the setting of the sun, so I ended up in darkness.

Everyone knows that roads and trails don’t look the same when you’re on your way out at night as they did when you were on your way in during the daylight.

I was in a woods that I had walked many times before, and I knew that if I walked straight in any direction I would be “out” in an hour or two. And yet, I panicked. I found myself running and following what seemed like a trail, though not a familiar one. And I know those are the wrong things to do.

The other time I was lost it was a bit more serious. I was on a section of the Appalachian Trail with a group, but I hurt my knee and was walking/limping at a snail’s pace. I was slowing down the group. Someone offered me a map with a shortcut back to the parking area (they wanted to finish the loop they were hiking) and I said that they should go on without me and I would head back on my own. Not a good idea on my part, but they went ahead.

We had been hiking for about 2 hours, so it would be at least 2 or 3 hours for me to get back using the shortcut at my slow pace. They had at least 4 hours left to complete the loop.

I headed off and was fine until I hit a long downhill section that was just murder on my knee. Lots of stops, hopping when I could, trying to use my staff as a crutch, cooling my knee with my water bottle. I think that I was so focused on my knee that I lost the trail. I lost THE trail, but I ended up on some trail.  After 2 hours, I knew I wasn’t passing any of the landmarks on the map. I knew I couldn’t walk back, so I studied the map trying to figure out where I was on it.

Even though I am pretty good with a map and compass, I couldn’t really fix on any landmarks to triangulate where I was sitting.  I took my best guess at the straightest path to the highway near the cars hoping that if I made it there at least the walking would be easier, and I might even hitchhike a ride to the parking lot.

Now I was off the trail. In my head, I ran several scenarios where I just could not walk any more or would slip, fall and break something or get knocked unconscious.  How long before the group would miss me?  And wouldn’t they look for me on the shortcut path I was supposed to follow?

Obviously, I did make it out. I actually arrived at the road, walked to the lot and arrived just minutes before the group. My shortcut had taken me about 4 hours. Of course, I told them I had been there for a few hours already, resting my knee and waiting for them to return so that we could go out for dinner and a few beers.

CompassThis past week I spotted a a new book titled  You Are Here: Why We Can Find Our Way to the Moon, but Get Lost in the Mall. It is written by  Colin Ellard,  a psychology professor at the University of Waterloo.

He says that Italian homing pigeons navigate using mental maps which include major highways and railroad tracks. He suggests that people make mental map stories to remember their way.

He says that if we were out in the woods, it doesn’t take far (a few hundred yards off course perhaps) for us to become lost.  Then we find it difficult to know if we are walking in a straight line any more. We can make remarkable turns and still feel that we are walking in a straight line. We also tend to speed up our movement, so we go farther off course faster.

What should we do when lost?  Stop.

Still, I think it’s a good thing to get lost once and a while. On purpose. Preferably in a place where you won’t die of exposure or be attacked by bears if it takes you 6 hours to get out. And you should follow all those rules about telling someone where you are going, taking a map, some food and water, a cell phone…  Of course, all those things also make it, perhaps, too comfortable. Can you really be lost with all that preparation?

And, there’s always that idea of getting lost in a less literal sense.

In writing, I find it’s a good idea to strike out to lands unknown and get lost a bit, if for no other reason than it feels so good to find yourself.

I have a friend who is being forced into retiring and he’s not dealing well with the situation. He’s lost about what to do with his time and life after 38 years of having it pretty well set on a very clear path day to day.

I asked him how long it took him after college to figure out what he wanted to do with his life.

“I’m not sure I ever did,” he said.

Of course, he did. It took him about four years of walking down path to find the one that worked for those 38 years. Maybe it wasn’t the ideal path, but it was a good one.

“So, why do you think it’s reasonable to expect that after being home for a month that you would know what you want to do with the rest of your life?” I said.  “If you said you were taking the next year to try some things and see what appeals to you, it would sound more realistic.”

I think Bill needs to be lost for a while. He needs his family and friends nearby. Right now, he needs his therapist and some medication too. He can consult maps. He can draw his own paths on them too. But he needs, like the rest of us, to be lost too if he is to find himself.

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Full Buck Moon

July 6, 2009 at 1:01 am (See It)
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deer-velvet

The full moon of July is most commonly known as the Buck Moon in many Native American traditions. July is normally the month when the new antlers of buck deer push out of their foreheads in coatings of velvety fur.

It was also called the Thunder Moon because of the frequency of thunderstorms during this hot, dry month.

To the early settlers, the nature signs they used to mark the full moons were generally related to their farming. This moon was often called the Full Hay Moon. This may be derived from the fact that the brightness of the moon allows one to harvest hay in the cool of the night rather than the heat of the day.

This year, the July moon appears on Tuesday, July 7 at 5:21 a.m. EDT.  Since the moon “arrives” at apogee later, this will also be smallest full moon of 2009.  In terms of apparent size, it will appear 12%  smaller than the full moon of January 1, 2009.

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Bookstores and Bookcrossings

July 5, 2009 at 12:36 pm (Do It, Read It)
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usedbookstore

“A bookstore is one of the only pieces of evidence we have that people are still thinking.”  – Jerry Seinfeld

Regular bookstores have fallen on tough times.  The American Booksellers Association is a national, not for profit trade association for independently owned bookstores, large and small, with storefront locations in towns and cities nationwide. They have been around since 1900.

We all know that reading is changing. Print is changing. The economy is crashing. It’s a perfect storm of disaster for bookstores, especially the smaller ones.

My favorite bookstores have always been used bookstores. It’s not just cheaper books. There is something about going through all the loosely organized books that I love.  I rarely ever go into a used bookstore looking for a particular book.

Maybe that was part of the appeal of BookCrossing.com. It’s a community site that organizes people who love books to share them.

The word bookcrossing was added to the Concise Oxford English Dictionary in 2004 as a noun – “the practice of leaving a book in a public place to be picked up and read by others, who then do likewise.”

I like this idea about treating the world as a free public library. I joined Bookcrossing a back in 2003 and have been releasing books “into the wild” for others to find. You can visit my Bookcrossing bookshelf to take a look without having to register. I am one of about 783,000 members worldwide who have put more almost 7 million books into circulation.

It’s not hard to do. You read a book. Decide you want to share it with others by giving it away. You go to bookcrossings.com (free accounts) and register the book and add a little comment about it.

You’ll get a unique BCID (BookCrossing ID number) to put on the book. Most people print out the labels that the site offers and put them on their book. The label says that this is a free book and explains how they can report that they picked up the book and journal it online.

Then you release it for someone else to read (give it to a friend, leave it on a park bench, donate it to charity, “forget” it in a coffee shop, etc.), and you’ll get notified by email each time someone goes to the site and records journal entries for that book.

Serendipity takes over. A person who loves to read discovers your book and makes a journal entry. Sometimes, people take them and never make journal entries – that sucks – but at least your book found a reader.

I suspect there are plenty of books that you have at home that they could send into the wild. You hate to throw them out, but even charities sometimes don’t want them. I try to use hardcover books when I can so they travel better, but I’ve done paperbacks too. Think of it as being green and recycling if nothing else.

The part of it that is most interesting is when someone picks up a book and actually goes online to journal about the where and when of the find and about the book itself.

For example, I registered a copy of The Virgin Suicides and released it in 2004 at the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival in Somerville, New Jersey USA.

Then I put my own journal note about it. Someone found it and was good enough to go online and add an entry:

“The book lay on the folding chair for quite some time, unclaimed. People glanced at it, but skirted it, as if they were respecting that it might be someone’s property. The poetry reading began, the chairs filled, and I wanted a place to sit down. I hesitated, because I thought it might be “saving” the seat. But then I sat down, holding the book on my lap, in case the owner came to claim it. No one did. I enjoyed the poetry reading a great deal. Then opened the book, as I was about to leave, because of the note taped to the cover. I saw that, strangely enough, the book was meant to be taken, and so I carried along with me.”

I guess anonymous didn’t get to read it for a while…

“October 02, 2005 – I’m sorry I waited a whole year to read this book. This is one of the best “first books” I’ve read in a while. About the Lisbons, a troubled family of five sisters in a Detroit suburb. The first thing that struck me, aside from the wonderful writing, is the voice. This book is told in first-person plural (as “we”), in the collective voices of the boys who were watching the Lisbon sisters growing up. First time I’ve seen this since Faulkner’s story, “A Rose for Emily,” which is also told by a sort of Greek chorus of townspeople, witnessing death, sex and tragedy from the outside. I am going to pass this on through PaperBackSwap.com. There’s a waiting list for the book, so I’m sure it will be out traveling into the world again in just a few days.”

So it was sent from Mount Vernon, NY to New Hampshire using paperbackswap.com yet. That site the mail to exchange, so there’s some mailing cost, but you get the book you want.

I need to go through the book shelves and select some new books to set free. Maybe you’ll find one of them, respond and this big circle will come around.

“There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.” – Ray Bradbury

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What’s Up With Work

July 4, 2009 at 1:04 am (Do It, Think About It)
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Photo by Marjory Collins,
Garage mechanic near Newark, New Jersey,
1943, Library of Congress

I’m being too concerned with work lately. I picked up an issue of Time magazine (May 25, 2009) on “The Future of Work” that looked at what work might be like in ten years. (I actually hope to be retired by then, but…)

With the economy what it is, and unemployment at a 25‑year high, it’s hard to avoid hearing about work.

Here are Time’s links to their intelligent guesses about how your work world will change.

  1. The Way We’ll Work
  2. High Tech, High Touch, High Growth
  3. Training Managers to Behave
  4. The Search for the Next Perk
  5. We’re Getting Off the Ladder
  6. Why Boomers Can’t Quit
  7. Women Will Rule Business
  8. It Will Pay to Save the Planet
  9. When Gen X Runs the Show
  10. Yes, We’ll Still Make Stuff
  11. The Last Days of Cubicle Life

Number 6 bums me out.  I’m pleased by numbers 7, 8. I am all for number 4.

Apparently, the 45-and-over age group favors base pay and health care as their 2 top benefitstop two. But the younger crew (18-to-34) chose base  pay (we all want the bucks) and career advancement at the top. Makes sense if you are at the start of your career and you think you will live health and a long time.  In fact, the young bucks didn’t even put “retirement benefits” in their top 10. Understandable, but short-sighted.

Speaking of retirement – the investment firm T. Rowe Price calculates that the oldest boomers will have to delay retirement by nearly nine years in order to recover what they lost in the market. Well, you can defer Social Security and try to save 25% of your salary, and then you should be able to reach retirement in 4 and a half.  All because those  stocks and real estate will still be yielding less into the future. I really don’t want to push retirement too far away.

Some people say that none of us should expect that we are “entitled” to a retirement. We should just expect to work until we can’t work.  I disagree.

My own questions are: when will it be financially safe to do it, where should I go, and what can I do to keep my brain alive. For that last one, it’s not “work” in the way that work has been since I was 21 that I’m looking to do – but what is it?

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Mix Tapes

June 28, 2009 at 11:28 pm (Do It, Hear It, Read It, See It)
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mixtape1A while back I came across this website that is edited by Jason Bittner called CassetteFromMyEx.com.  On the site people share their stories of lost (or everlasting) love that center around a mix tape they made for their love.

Jason Bittner is the co-creator of FOUND Magazine and an interesting photo book about LaPorte, Indiana. He also put together Cassette from My Ex: Stories and Soundtracks of Lost Loves which  is a collection of stories, essays, art, and other contributions by various artists, musicians, and writers.  It’s the story of the role of the mixtape that was especially big in the late 1970s and 80s when cassette tape reigned.

There’s also a book called Mix Tape: The Art of Cassette Culture by Thurston Moore . He is a founding member of the rock group Sonic Youth, as well as a poet. He also runs EcstaticPeace.com, a music, art, and literature website.

The compact audio cassette has been around since 1963. In the 1970s, these  inexpensive and portable tapes were part of the “downloadable” music culture long before the Internet and Napster.

Mix tapes let the DJ in us loose to create mixes for ourselves, friends, parties, road trips – and for those we loved.

Moore classifies those love tapes into categories like the Romantic Tape, the Break-up Tape, the Road Trip Tape, to the Indoctrination Tape (made to introduce someone to “your music.”

And it was often more than just the songs.  There was the artwork, packaging, “liner notes” and even the sequencing.

One extended story of mixtape romance is by rock critic Rob Sheffield. He wrote a memoir using 22 “mix tapes” to describe his life with his wife, Renee, from their meeting in 1989 to her untimely death in 1997. Each of the chapters in Love Is a Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time begins with song titles from their mixes.

I have been making mix tapes all through the tape period and into CDs (some people still call them mixtapes). Though I have made many for my own listening pleasure, so that in the car I am listening to my own radio station, about half have been for other people.

My friend Steve gets sets when he heads across country in his car.  Though I imagined when I made them that they were highway sets, late night radio sets, an hour of quieter music sets, he told me recently that he only liked the loud ones – “Because I have the car windows open so I can smoke.”

A group of friends and I came up with a list of all our favorite summer songs. From the obvious ones (Beach Boys’ tracks like “All Summer Long,”  “In the Summertime,” “Summer Breeze”)  to songs we associated with summer because they were summer hits or we just associated with summer (”Time of the Season,” “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number,” “Take It Easy”).  Then I did the sequencing after gathering them from our collected CDs and with a few iTunes downloads. I listened to all of them trying to pick out references to a month or part of summer and created June, July and August sets.  “See You In September,” “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” and “School’s Out” are part of the June set.  For July, “Up on the Roof,” “Summer in the City,” “4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy),” Kodachrome,” Hot Fun in the Summertime.”  The August CD included “Summer, Highland Falls,” Boys of Summer,” “Groovin’” “Summertime Blues,” “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling,” Summer Wind.”

My friend Pat was a big fan of the summer set, so she (a teacher) also got back-to-school and end-of-school mixes. And I have done winter, spring, and winter into spring CDs.

My largest set of mixes are for my wife, Lynnette.  This month we hit anniversary thirty, so the mixes span decades. Most of the early cassettes have jammed their last time, so we have moved to CDs the past decade.

The first mixtapes were actually pre-marriage. Tapes I made for car rides to the beach or vacations.  Have you seen the movie As Good As It Gets? Jack Nicholson’s character makes careful mixes for a car trip in the hope of seducing the character played by Helen Hunt. If not seduce, at least made to reveal who he really is via the songs – something he can’t seem to do in person. Been there; mixed that.

I love making lists anyway, so making song lists is something I like doing – like the people in Nick Hornby’s novel High Fidelity and the great film version (and even the soundtrack CD).

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An Algorithim For Happiness

June 27, 2009 at 1:38 am (Think About It)
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I don’t write about my work life on this blog. I have a blog about my work (which is actually school) just for that.  But this post started with an article about work that I read in The Wall Street Journal. and moved in an interesting way.   Here’s how that article opened:

Concerned a brain drain could hurt its long-term ability to compete, Google Inc. is tackling the problem with its typical tool: an algorithm.

The Internet search giant recently began crunching data from employee reviews and promotion and pay histories in a mathematical formula Google says can identify which of its 20,000 employees are most likely to quit.

Google officials are reluctant to share details of the formula, which is still being tested. The inputs include information from surveys and peer reviews, and Google says the algorithm already has identified employees who felt underused, a key complaint among those who contemplate leaving.

Wow. An algorithim to determine if employees are dissatisfied with their jobs. This from a company that I thought was the place everyone wanted to be. Apparently, Google is no longer the best or only place for tech types and future entrepreneurs to learn.  New kids like  Twitter and Facebook and getting Google people to come on board.

Can you really pull together a bunch of data and tell whether I am happy or not in my work? Will stats more accurately reveal how I feel than sitting down and talking to me? True, I may not want to say to my boss that I am unhappy. So, could you pull it out of my sick days, performance reports and such?

My last two jobs were big on performance reviews.  Personal improvement plans. Merit pay.

The got some of it from the idea of  “forced ranking.”  Lots of pages of qualities and It’s almost like a kinder, gentler version of the “forced ranking.” It’s pretty harsh. It encourages companies to  fire the bottom 10 percent of their employees to get rid of the malcontents. Companies may call it a “talent management process” or “leadership assessment procedure” instead of forced ranking.

Identify your best employees, shock others out of complacency, reduce favoritism. Take your top performers and reward, keep, and train them to be your new leaders of the business.

Fans of forced ranking say that 40% of your  “C” players will voluntarily resign.

Wait. What about the happiness algorithm?

I did some web searching and, as is often the case these days, my ideas are not original.  People have thought about a happiness algorithm.  Psychologist Barbara Frederickson wrote a book called (one of those simple titles with a colon and a long explanation that academics love) Positivity: Groundbreaking Research Reveals How to Embrace the Hidden Strength of Positive Emotions, Overcome Negativity, and Thrive.

Turns out her theories have been mixed in with those of others,  like Marcial Losada who looks at high-performing teams in business and says: “…high-performing teams had about a six-to-one ratio of positive to negative statements, whereas the low-performing teams had ratios of less than one to one, meaning that more than half of what was said was negative.”

Losada is into mathematical modeling – data from observations of business teams, algebraic equations.

Now, here is where the connections turned around on me. He finds that his equations matched the Lorenz system – that chaos theory and “butterfly effect” that I just wrote about last week. Spooky action at a distance. Positivity creates positivity. What Fredeickson calls  a “complex chaotic attractor.”

3to1Those high-performing teams produce novel creative results.  A ratio of three positive events to one negative event is the tipping point where good chaos begins.

Try doing or saying or just thinking three positive things for every negative one. A very simple algorithm for happiness.

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Sumer Is Icumen In Today

June 21, 2009 at 1:21 am (Do It, See It)
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AP photo/Mark Hamblin, RSPB/PA Britains cuckoo bird, known for its distinctive call, is in danger of extinction.

Cuckoo, AP photo/Mark Hamblin, RSPB/PA

“Sumer Is Icumen In” is a traditional English round, and possibly the oldest such example of counterpoint in existence. The song’s title might is usually translated as “Summer has come in” or “Summer has arrived” – but I kind of like “Summer is coming in.”

You remember a round, right? It’s a musical composition in which two or more voices sing exactly the same melody (and may continue repeating it indefinitely), but with each voice beginning at different times so that different parts of the melody coincide in the different voices, but nevertheless fit harmoniously together. You sang “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” in some childhood music class, I’m sure.

And summer is coming in today, so sing out loud…
(here’s the modern English version – for a challenge, feel free to try the Middle English lyrics)

Summer is a-coming in,
Loudly sing, Cuckoo!
The seed grows and the meadow
blooms
And the wood springs anew,
Sing, Cuckoo!
The ewe bleats after the lamb
The cow lows after the calf.
The bullock stirs, the stag farts,
Merrily sing, Cuckoo!
Cuckoo, cuckoo, well you sing,
cuckoo;
Don’t you ever stop now,

Sing cuckoo now. Sing, Cuckoo.
Sing Cuckoo. Sing cuckoo now!

Stag Scaffolding Sculpture by Ben Long
at Oakmayne building site, Elephant Road, London

I bet you were surprised that “bucke uerteþ” is translated as “the stag farts”, but that’s the current consensus rather than “the buck-goat turns.” The stag farting is supposed to be a sign of virility indicating the stag’s potential for creating new life, echoing the rebirth of Nature from the barren period of winter. Uh huh.

summersun
On the astronomical side, my northern hemisphere, today is the longest day of the year. The Sun is farthest north.  (In the southern hemisphere, winter and summer solstices are exchanged.) The summer solstice marks the first day of summer, and the declination of the Sun is known as the Tropic of Cancer. The time that will elapse between sunrise and sunset today is the maximum for the year, so get out there and make the most of it!

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The Butterfly Effect

June 20, 2009 at 12:12 pm (Think About It)

Albert Einstein said that “God does not play dice with the universe.”

Another physicist, Joseph Ford, said  “God plays dice with the universe, but they’re loaded dice. And the main objective is to find out by what rules were they loaded and how can we use them for our own ends.”

Chaos theory came from an MIT meteorologist, Edward Lorenz. He discovered that natural systems, like weather, are governed by the the “Butterfly Effect.”  This effect – the “sensitive dependence on initial conditions” -  is the essence of chaos.

(You can run this little program from CalTech that illustrates the Lorenz Attractor or Butterfly Effect. )

The idea is that something small, like the flap of a butterfly’s wings, can set off a chaotic chain reaction.

If you believe the classical Greek myths, then the creation of our world came out of chaos, is surrounded by chaos, and will end in chaos.

So, is the only certainty in life, uncertainty?

Don’t some very minor events in our lives have profound effects?

Some psych experiments have shown that you have better recall when you learn something randomly rather than in a more orderly fashion.  Other researchers have shown that your thinking becomes  most productive when your brain waves appear most chaotic.

MORE
Someone else who is sometimes credited with chaos theory is the 19th century French mathematician Henri Poincaré.

There is a film called The Butterfly Effect that connects the the flutter of a butterfly and the flutter of the human heart.  It’s not a great film, but I was attracted to it because the protagonist finds that when he reads from the journals he kept as a teen, he travels back in time. (I am a sucker for time travel.)  He gets some do-overs on parts of his past. Of course, like all time travelers, there are consequences from this in the present.  No matter how well-intentioned his actions may be, they have unintended consequences.

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Full Moons

June 20, 2009 at 12:40 am (See It)
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There is something about the moon. I have been posting this year about each of the full moons – the Native American names for each one and other European names for them too.

We are halfway through the year and the post on the “Wolf Moon” continues to be read/hit/found more than any other, but all the full moon posts find an audience. They are hardly my best posts, but they are popular.


Maybe it’s a sign that people are regaining an awareness for the signs in nature. I know I am more attuned to the moon phases. Even more so, I pay attention to the signs from the budding, blooming and fruiting of plants and trees,  and to the behaviors of insects and animals.

Part of that interest comes from being a gardener. Part of it also comes from writing, especially poetry. (Haiku are especially good about making you pay attention to the mention of a blossom or activity to identify the season.)

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I Want A Do-Over

June 14, 2009 at 1:07 pm (Do It, Read It, Think About It)
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When I was a kid, we had “do-over” as part of most games we played.  The football hit a wire from the telephone poll – do-over.   The bike jump ramp falls over before you hit it – do-over.

On a Windows computer, you gotta love Ctrl-Z – undo.  Wouldn’t we love an UNDO button for life. That would be better than that “Easy” button from Staples.

I came across this book, Do-Over! by Robin Hemley, who seems pretty haunted by memories of failure and embarrassment from his childhood days.  So, he tries to go back for a second chance – some do-overs.

He’s 48 and he  revisits kindergarten, summer camp, sixth grade and the high school prom in attempts to set right what had gone wrong.

He had a kindergarten teacher who (he recalls) stepped on his back during nap time. (According to him, she was “committed”  the year after he had her as a teacher.)  She told his parents he was going to grow up to be a “thug. “

I remember staying after school the first day of kindergarten because I hadn’t finished my work. My mom had to come in to get me. The teacher (Mrs. Sampson, who I really liked) asked us to pick two colors of crayons and then color in the boxes on a sheet of graph paper. Right off,  she didn’t like my color selection – purple and orange. Most of the kids just scribbled the sheets and were done with it. I was outlining boxes and then coloring them in.  This was an early sign of what my school personality would be, and a pretty good indicator of who I am to this day, for better and for worse.

Hemley actually gets permission to go into a kindergarten where he says  “the kids immediately accepted me, not as a 5-year-old, but as a fellow kindergartner.”

I can’t identify with his summer camp experiences. We were way too poor for any camps. I actually have very fond memories of my Huck Finn summers for the first 10 years of my life.  Lots of freedom in those early 1960s days.  Little  organized play other than some recreation programs at the local park where we played kickball  and knock hockey, ate icepops  and made lanyards.  (see bottom of post).

I know people who went off to summer camp and I taught for many years in a town where it seemed like every kid was gone for the summer. Many of them seemed to have stronger memories of camp life than of their home and family experiences. I always found it rather sad. They definitely did not find it sad.

Hemley seems to have had a bad summer camp experience mostly because he couldn’t do sports. When he returns to camp for his do-over, he learns about what he calls  “regressive pull.”  He says that means that when you are around a group of people who are appreciably younger than you, you actually start acting that age.   At the camp, he was around a bunch of 10-year-olds, so…

do-overHemley also went back to a high school prom.  He missed the real one because he was too shy to ask out the girl he had a crush on.

I missed mine for a number of reasons. First off, I had no real girlfriend and I didn’t want to just go with a “date.” Second, I would nver have had the money for pay for it. As a northeastern New Jersey kid, there were two post-prom traditions: into New York City to a nightclub and then down the Jersey shore for a beach weekend.

Also, none of my closest friends were going. It was that just past hippie, still Vietnam War time and a prom was not so cool.

I did only the weekend at the shore. Seaside Heights, NJ.  Boardwalks, illegal alcohol and summer rent-a-cops busting kids.

Hemley contacted his high school to explain his idea for a do-over.  Fate stepped in and the his former crush is now the school’s alumni liaison. Married with three kids, he was allowed to ask his also married high school crush to the prom.

Did he fix everything when he went back to try it again? What do you think? He definitely got to put things in perspective and through the distance of time, they don’t look like the failures they did at the time.

There is an excerpt online – here’s the start:

Most likely, you don’t remember your nemesis in kindergarten, but I remember mine, probably because I had two. Virginia Adams was the teacher’s pet, and our teacher, Mrs. Collins, hated me. She told my mother I was going to grow up to be “a thug.” Those were her exact words. But she loved Virginia, and Virginia took every opportunity to flaunt her superiority. Often Virginia would sing to me: “I’m named after a state, and you’re only named after a bird.”

Mrs. Collins hated me because of an unfortunate encounter with a small rubber lobster. When we received our first report cards — full of Es and Ps and other letters hardly ever used beyond kindergarten — Mrs. Collins told us to bring them home to our parents, who had to sign them. In 1963, parents meant “Mom,” and maybe that’s even how Mrs. Collins phrased it: “Bring this report card home, and make sure your mother signs it before you come to class tomorrow.” Most fathers, mine included, left the signatures and just about everything else to moms.

Listen to Billy Collins read his poem about the lanyard he made for his mom at camp.

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