When I started college at the University of Minnesota I was sixteen. I was not ready. At an orientation session the speaker told the 1200 students assembled to look at the students on their left and right. “A year from today only one of you will still be here,” he said. I looked at my neighbors and thought “You poor schmucks, why not give up right now.” But a year later it was me that was gone.
The coursework was not the issue. I had been a good little high school student and had rote memorization absolutely down pat. Ask me a question and I could regurgitate pages of information without necessarily understanding what I was saying.
When I hit campus I was on my own, no one to tell me where to go or where to turn and it wasn’t working for me. I kept taking turns westward and walking down to the river road to breathe in the earthy pungency of the Mississippi River while I read poetry and imagined that I was the bastard soul child of T.S. Eliot and Anna Akhmatova, kept hidden all these years.
The university wasn’t going to reward my personal variety of independent study so I dropped out in early Spring.
The next Fall I was back, with a new major and slightly better frame of mind. Because I was cursed with a baby face I took up smoking a pipe, because I fancied that it made me appear more mature. Looking back I realize that I resembled the infant photo on a box of Gerber baby cereal, but with a pipe in my mouth.
This time I lasted less than six months before the river called my name again and I answered. Taking a year completely off finally cured me of those wandering urges and I began to buckle down and do the work. Never looked back.
And all the while, down at the Big Ten, this tune was in frequent rotation.
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I’ve got a problem. A couple of years ago I was introduced to a condiment that absolutely improved my life in the kitchen. When one adds a spoonful of this stuff to a soup, stew, chili sauce … a myriad of dishes … there is quite an umami kick.
I found it to be such a flexible and delectable ingredient and yet, in this entire time I have failed to get even one person to try it. It goes like this:
You like to cook? Well you really ought to try this the next time you make that stew.
What is it, then?
Fish sauce. (at this point their expression changes to quizzical, and they turn their chair so there is nothing between them and the door.)
What’s fish sauce? (they always ask, having now come to full runner’s stance.)
It’s fermented anchovies! (and off they go in full panic mode uttering a high keening sound as they bolt from the room).
And that’s it. No takers on my advice … ever. Not only that, they stop accepting dinner invitations to my home.
I don’t get it. Why do you suppose the idea of eating skillfully rotted fish liquid puts people off?
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New Year’s Eve approacheth. We have no plans. We usually have no plans. The last times we hosted parties everyone had gone home to bed by 10:30. If one is not drinking alcohol, the excitement of watching a mechanical ball drop or televised strangers displaying embarrassing behavior somewhere in the world palls a bit.
We could take up my grandfather’s practice and write 2024 on the pipe leading from the oil heater in the living room with a piece of carpenter chalk. If we had an oil heater, a pipe, and a hunk of blue chalk, that is.
New Year’s is really the only holiday affected by my living sober. In my family of origin it was the generally recognized excuse for getting inebriated, if one chose to take that route.
I have recollections of spending more than one New Year’s morning worshipping the porcelain god back when I was quite a bit more foolish than I am now. I miss those times not at all.
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We don’t make New Year’s resolutions here at Basecamp. Actually, if you are in a recovery program, you’re making them off and on throughout the entire year. Any goal that I set these days is a modest one, and has to be something achievable within a fairly short period of time.
Part of the reason for doing it this way is that my memory has made a shift from a remarkably reliable instrument to one that is barely worth squat, and if I say I’ll do such and such by twelve months from now, when that deadline rolls around I may not even notice it, much less adhere to an old pledge.
But you insist that I make at least one New Year’s resolution? Okay, here’s one I think that I can keep: During the year 2024 I will work very hard at improving the level of discourse here on the blog. I will do this by becoming as politically neutral as I can, and stop calling former president Cluck a malignant blowhard. Henceforth he will be referred to as the Turncoat in Chief.
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Little Home In The Valley 