Joe Nation

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• Posts: 12,133
• Location: The City.
• Occupation: Professional 20 Questions Player

We aim, in Michael Oakeshott's words, to live amid the conversation "an endless unrehearsed intellectual adventure in which, in imagination, we enter a variety of modes of understanding the world and ourselves and are not disconcerted by the differences or dismayed by the inconclusiveness of it all."



I am now living my two thousandth life.
Actually, 2,784th.
First, I was a hippie. I danced whether there was music or not.
Whether alone, or surrounded by thousands.
I took college classes and
hung out on the Boston Common with my guitar.
We marched for the end of the War.
Then I joined the War.
I was in uniform,
(Okay. Hippies had uniforms too, but this was a real uniform.)
I marched.
(Okay. Not the same kind of marching that hippies do.
Real marching.
With a marching band and flags and very serious people on all sides.
I did not fit in well.
I opened a off-base off the base coffeehouse
where we sang hippie-ish songs and
waited for the end of our hitch
while some of our friends
serious and otherwise
died.
Really.
I started writing.
School books.
Little stories for fifth grade or third grade
that taught that the world was open
and how to spell the word raisin.
Then I went into television.
(Okay, not into the television, into television news.
Which was news then and not infotainment,
but saying that makes me sound like an old hippie.
Which apparently I have become.
And on the way
I married.
Several women.
but not all at once.
even I am that smart.
My grown up children are musicians and kinda hippie like.
I have days when I am glad about that
and I have days when regrets, I have a few.
(Apologies to Paul Anka)
I practiced yoga.
I ran 30 miles a week.
I refereed soccer games
and rode my bicycle thousands and thousands of miles.
Threw a paper route
painted apartments,
sold furniture,
bought wire and gears and god knows what
for a factory job.

and I stopped writing.

You know, writing is hard to do. It's painful.
Not as painful as not writing, but still.....

I tried to be boring for a few years.
The other boring people said I didn't fit in well.

Well.

So.
I wrote teeny tiny things for a tiny teeny neighborhood paper.
About how to fix things.
(That's how Eva knows me.
She was my editor. Poor thing.)

And we,
L and I,
got bored with living under gigantic Oklahoma skies.
(and I had ridden
every inch of chip and seal highway
for three states around)

So we moved to New York City.

That was twelve years ago or two hundred,
I can't really tell.

Somewhere in those years one prodigal son returned,
we rejoiced.
He cleaned up his act.
We rejoiced.
He met someone and they had the cutest baby boy.
We were overjoyed.
And that sometimes is a problem.
He announced that, though I had been a part of his life
as his adoptive father, he wanted no further contact with me.
He thought it would be confusing to explain all the grandparents
to the cutest baby boy.
Um? I said.

So L worked in fashion
and I managed a hardware store
and I got fat from too many MaryAnn's Mexican meals.

So I started running again. I went from puffing to the bus stop
to finishing the 2007 NYC Marathon.

And this past January 1st, I said out loud.
"I think my life cannot get any better."

And by mid-August, it lay in ashes.

L left.
Left twenty years of marriage.
She was unhappy.

I was writing this fabulous story now
about this guy who had 2,784 lives.
And my editor kept saying
"Pick one for christ'ssakes!!"
but I couldn't because
they are all my favorite lives.
So far.
But, maybe,
just maybe,
this 2785th life will be the one.

It has all the right elements of a comeback.