I was trying the other day to imagine what went through my mind when I was 25. It’s both a difficult and amusing exercise.
It requires erasing a lot of experience, history, knowledge, wisdom, joy and pain — maybe ‘ignoring’ is a better term — and seeing what sparse caricature of reality is left to assemble into a marginally coherent view of the world, recognizing that “hindsight” is still at play here, sabotaging the mechanics of memory.
It also requires recalling — painful and even embarrassing as it might be — what dreams and expectations I entertained at the time, as immature and undeveloped as I was.
I can’t say I came up with anything very interesting or startling. One thing I can assert with absolute certainty . . .
I never imagined I would at this stage in my life be living in Japan growing onions in my modest garden!
Not that I have anything against onions. On the contrary, onions are spectacular! They have a lot of symmetry and are about as essential as it gets in the kitchen.
It’s just that at 25 I was still living in my home state of Michigan. And I was more pre-occupied with exhaust fumes than fertile soil or keeping monkeys from stealing me blind. True, I was no longer in Detroit. And 25-years-of-age was post-university. But avoiding the exhaust fumes of pompous college professors had replaced avoiding the exhaust fumes of automobiles and factories.
Anyway here I am. And I’m a “proud papa”! Just look at this fine specimen . . .
Yes, a lot has happened over the many years, and a lot has changed. So my life is not just about vegetables. I write novels and unique — some would say eccentric — creative non-fiction books. More importantly, much of my focus these days is on political activism, specifically anti-war activism. You can get the flavor of my efforts HERE and HERE.
Oh . . . one last thing. The inspiration for the title of this article was Gertrude Stein. Here is the story from Wikipedia: “The sentence ‘Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose’ was written by Gertrude Stein as part of the 1913 poem Sacred Emily, which appeared in the 1922 book Geography and Plays.” As if you didn’t already know that.
