So Welcome 2018
The year 2017 slips away as I write this and will be history by the time most anyone might read this, and I did not really catch the significance of it until late in the year. I mean it was the 50-year point of my life out of high school. I graduated in June of 1967.
And I was lost. I did not know what to do next. There had been plans to go to college but I was not really ready for that. But had I wanted to I got a good deal. An offer to work for the community college with quarters to live in. I would work on the school farm. I had taken agricultural classes in high school. In fact I did start the job and worked the summer of 1967. Both on the old school farm, where my camp trailer quarters were, and the new school farm on the new campus, just being readied for opening that fall.
I even attended one week of classes that fall. And then I dropped out. I’ve told people this story before but what happened is that I saw all the kids I either did not like or did not really know well from high school and just wanted to get out of there.
Academically I was not ready either.
But during that summer ostensibly I was still on the plan to go to college and work on the farm. My main boss at the time was an instructor named Bill Burrows. Seemed like a nice man. Real energetic. During that summer he supervised several of us young men, either entering students or continuing students, in splitting cedar rails for fencing on the new farm. We actually camped up in the mountains for a time doing this.
I always thought he was a lot older, but now I realize that he was I think only 11 years older than I was. I read just a few weeks ago that he died last June.
These days I drive up and down the road past that old school farm in a tractor-trailer rig. I’m often hauling produce. So I never did finish my ag classes — although I did take some night classes later. But between the produce hauling and a few years of writing agricultural news for newspapers (besides general news), I did or have made my living from agriculture nonetheless. Maybe Mr. Burrows would be proud.
I saw him by chance once when I was doing farm news for a local newspaper. I needed a good photo for a farm page I was putting together, and I saw someone driving a caterpillar tractor way out in a field on the edge of the foothills. I went out there and snapped a picture. Lo and behold it was Mr. Burrows. He was working on his parents’ farm. I had not known he was of that area.
I had also seen him before that when I went back to classes at the community college after spending three years in the army. But this time I was enrolled in journalism. He suggested that I enroll in ag too and become an agricultural journalist. I did in a way.
But so many things happen in life. I got married. We had two children. And I think I spent a large part of my life trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life.
These days I spend more time just living it. My wife passed away seven years ago. I myself thought my life was about to be cut short ten years ago when I was diagnosed with an incurable cancer. But life goes on.
I thought about making some new year’s resolutions but I think instead it might be more productive to just keep living that life, with the only resolution being to keep on living and enjoying it.
I do the best I can at that.
p.s.
Maybe one resolution. Learn more Spanish. I’ve developed a hobby of sorts — learning Spanish. I visit Spain each September (four times so far). It’s really a lot more fun when you speak the lingo. I’m trying. And for you English-only people, I can only suggest that you learn a lot more about your own language when you study a foreign language.
Oh, and that thing I said about being lost after high school. Well I met another lost soul. We spent 43 years together. We were too young to be married but I think she was more mature than I. She had a tougher childhood and had to be. But she helped me along. Without her I might still be lost.
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