Cracked Window

My fascination with boxing began as a boy. Never the fighting type, I liked the drama. But as youth passed I no longer cared.

Many years later, I missed the rise of the cable-TV phenomenon Ultimate Fighting. Then in 2003, a Willamette Week ad touted a night of brawling. I attended to fulfill a graduate school story assignment: find an event and describe what I observed.

Waiting for the fights to begin, I saw people fawning over a guy leaning against a wall. I quickly learned Randy Couture was a world champion in this brutal sport and briefly interviewed him. He had the saddest ears I’ve ever seen.

Selective memory erasure, coming to a doctor’s office near you!

Such a treatment option appears inevitable based on accelerating medical research into how to manipulate what we remember.

Imagine the possibilities: even in my fifties, as age slowly blunts the pain of life’s low-lights, I could enjoy not remembering anything about events I choose. Who wouldn’t take advantage of this breakthrough?

I’ve written recently about finding a long-lost friend in an unlikely way, via his son’s photo on a Facebook page. Now comes word that the son — singer, songwriter, and aspiring actor — will soon release his first CD.

His father and I have exchanged emails since making contact in September and pledged to meet at some point soon. His emails took on more vibrancy today when I listened to two of his son’s songs on MySpace. They’re beautiful, conveying range and passion and artistry that remind me of entertainers who achieved stardom.

To my ear, young James’ soaring voice sounds nothing like his father’s, not that I can recall my friend ever singing. There’s certainly no evidence of dad’s touch of Kentucky accent. As I listened, the songs brought to mind — oddly — basketball.

They say that after death people live on in others’ dreams. But I rarely dream about my mother, dead for five years. I much prefer how she materialized last month at my forty-year high school reunion in Winter Park, Florida.

Several friends told me how much they liked my mother. Who could blame them? She swore a lot, was intensely curious about their love lives, and freely dispensed advice on how to attract girls. By the time we were seniors, she let us throw back a beer or two. Better than driving around town and drinking, she’d say.

I’ve made it halfway through a movie that uses my childhood home on a Central Florida lake as a main setting. One of my brother’s bought the DVD after I learned of the film and wrote about it.

So far it’s like glancing around a museum I visited a long time ago, a familiar building containing exhibits I don’t recognize. I choked up a bit at the first glimpse of the living room, a room I haven’t seen since 1970, the year my family moved out while I was away at college. But my notion that I’d be sent hurtling back and experience wave after wave of bittersweet nostalgia isn’t materializing.

Thirteen years ago, a mountain lion looked at me. I still see clearly its long sleek body, two hundred yards away on a bare hilltop.

Suzame and I were hiking at Point Reyes National Seashore in California and had reached the highest point, Mt. Wittenberg. At first I thought the mountain lion was a big dog, but the tail and graceful gait said otherwise. It stopped and stared at us, and I began to consider our options if it headed toward us. After a very long minute, the beast padded away.

I have a high school friend named Jim. I haven’t seen him in nearly four decades. In fact, none of our other friends have seen him in years. This protracted absence gives Jim a leg up on the rest of us: he’s frozen in our minds as he was back then, young and good-natured and athletic.

People have a way of drifting off after high school and college, not by design, but more like dandelion seeds on a puff of wind. We end up where we do, looking forward and not back. At least until the weight of so many passing years reverses everything, and we try to put the flower back together.