The Layers of my Life

Three times in the past five days I have been struck, or even assaulted, by memories that overcame me when I was in San Diego. What was significant about these memories, however, was that they came in a "layered" fashion. That is, they weren't simply provocative of one event from the past; they triggered a series of memories embedded in my brain like different strata of ancient Troy. But the memories in one instance did something even more--they made me wonder about certain beliefs I adopted at one time in my past which I do not share now. Well, all these statements deserve some clarification.

The Three Triggering Events

1. The first happened when I was walking along Hotel Circle North on an early Friday morning. I immediately was brought back to the three previous times I had visited San Diego as an adult, and each one of them did something very important for me. The first was in 1986/87, when I was on the Board of Directors of Portland Community College. Several of us Board members stayed at the Town & Country for a conference. My memory not only included some people I met at that time, but it also lingered on my feelings of ambition, hope and openness for the future which were so much a part of my life. The second time was when I took my son to San Diego to watch the Holiday Bowl in 1999. We stayed not far from Qualcomm Stadium, and I relived our walk to and from the stadium, where my son (12 at the time) was brimming with such excitement and unabashed enthusiasm for a game featuring an Oregon team. Then, I recalled my 2006 trip to San Diego, when I met Dr. Bernard Rimland shortly before his death and began to develote myself to the study of autism.

2. Then, the second series of memories happened when I was sitting outside the conference ballroom in the warm San Diego afternoon. What provoked the memories this time, however, was something as gossamer and insubstantial as the "feel" of the air. So salubrious was the afternoon sun and breeze that it was as if I was transported back to 1968 or 1969, when I had just moved from CT to CA (summer of 1967). But it was the content of the memory triggered that was significant. I recall I was at a Christian conference at a like conference center (maybe something like Mt. Hermon in the Santa Cruz Mountains). I believed that the "air" that I breathed in 1968 or 1969 was an actual expression of the presence of God. The combination of air and content of the conference led me to believe that God himself was in the air--that my invogorated feeling was an indication of the special and close presence of God. Something about Evangelicalism and the California air then became embedded deep in my psyche--so that each time I visited CA in the 1970s and 1980s (after college or in early career), I had the same sense of divine presence "in the air." But, in fact, as I was basking in the San Diego air last Friday, I just realized that any direct connection between the air and "God" was out of the question. It just was the incredible and blessed richess of the CA sun.

But this second series of memories on the "air" also led me to reflect on the many times I had let my "sense" of things as a young person define the world for myself in a way that proved unhelpful. For example, because I felt that God was "right there" in my life, I tended to interpret my impressions as to how to live as an indication of what I actually should do. I ended up living by impulse because I believed that the presence of God meant that anything I did, even without consideration, would be "of God." As I look back at my life from the 1970s and 1980s in 2008, then, I think that nearly every decision I made in those days of significance was a poor one. I just didn't take the time to live in uncertainty or to do the patient work of trying to sort out my feelings about a decision I should pursue.

3. But there is yet one more set of memories unleashed by my trip to San Diego. While I was in the Timken Museum of Art in Balboa Park, I not only looked at the 20 or so works of art from the 15th-19th centuries, but I realized that almost all of the artists were familiar to me and that most of them triggered memories from my visiting galleries and studying books beginning in 1991 which contained their works. For example, the gallery had Eastman Johnson's 1880 work The Cranberry Harvest, Island of Nantucket and Martin Heade's Magnolia Blossoms. But I can never see a Martin Heade today without taking myself back to some of his Southern New England paintings of bales of hay or his luminist representation of dawn in marshy New England climes. Some pantings are here. I began to learn about Heade and the Hudson River School and the luminists through visiting Midwest galleries while living in Kansas--the Wichita Art Museum, Nelson Atkins in Kansas City, Joslyn in Omaha, the Philbrook in Tulsa and other museums as well as poring over books on American painting. Thus, when I saw Head's painting today, as well as a Johnson work, or a Raphaelle Peale or paintings form European artists such as Bruegel or Fragonard or others, it made me relive in the early 1990s, caling back the joys and deep pain of those years.

Conclusion

Thus, over the course of five days in San Diego, when I was supposed to be (and indeed was!) thinking about autism and various issues regarding its treatment, I found myself increasingly being taken away from my "present-day" focus and plunging back to times in my life where other things had been so real for me. The air brought me back to the late 1960s in CA; the art museum took me to the early 1990s, when I lived in Sterling KS; the walk along Hotel Drive North took me to the mid-1980s, the late 1990s and then 2006. In a way, then, this time in San Diego, though I learned so much more about autism, was especially rich precisely because it brought me much deeper into chapters of my life that have meant so much to me. Thus, the major learning of the past five days was of my life. If every conference could do the same, I would be delighted...

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