January 26, 2006

• Featured Grownups: Biggest Impact

  This is a Topic Entry for the Featured Grownups blogring.

   

  TOPIC: What PERSON or CAUSE has made the biggest impact on your life? Tell us about that impact...Educate us on the Person OR Cause...Share your experience so that we can better know you and learn from you! More entries here.

  
  I can never wirte about just "one" of anything. If I post one poem, I post ten. If I post a photo, I post a dozen.  If there's one person who has made an impact on my life, there are five more.

  Here are a few of the people/causes who/that have made big impacts on my life.

  1.The Impetus to Write. I write because of Mr. Gardner, my 7th grade teacher, the man who introduced me to Roget's College Thesaurus, of which I still have my dogeared copy from the 7th grade. Up until 7th grade, which was "junior high school" and in a different school than I had attended with elementary school, I exercised my creativity by drawing and sculpting with clay and papier mache. I've written about my siblings and our playtime, and how my mother especially helped to foster imagination and the search for intelligence. But it was my 7th grade English teacher, Mr. Gardner, who actually sparked my desire to write.
  We were given assignments to write "essays" each week. The "essay" could be a short story, a reminiscence, or an actual essay. To this day, I call all my prose works 'essays' in remembrance of my 7th grade English class. I don't have in my possession any of the essays I wrote, but a lot of them were in the form of short stories. By using the Thesaurus, the class was goaded to improve our vocabulary. For those who might not know, even though on the internet sites like dictionary.com and encarta have an online thesaurus, it is a list of antonyms and synonyms for words. By using a thesaurus, a writer finds ways not to repeat himself. For instance, there are many ways of saying the word "said" in a story, to inflict slivers of meaning in each word we write. I learned about this in 7th grade, and it has never left me. I thank Mr. Gardner for his attention to detail in spurring his classroom to think and write. I still have my report card. He always gave me an A+ in  class, and this further enhanced my desire to write more as the years advanced on the calendar.
  2. The Concept of "Realizations". My "Godfather", Jimmy Giordano, introduced me to the concept of "realization", a term I use frequently. Jimmy was the store manager for FedMart Furniture to Go in 1978, my place of employment as a truck driver and warehouse manager. Jimmy later championed me to become the division truck driver and was instrumental in my rising in the retail ranks, eventually becoming one of the merchandise managers of the Culver City FedMart right before the company went out of business. Jimmy taught me about "realizations". In my Universal Mind Theory, I use this term to describe the signposts that life gives us, in order to help our enlightenment. We "realize" things and events are causes of our current living conditions, and ways for us to better our situation. Jimmy didn't think in such a spiritual way, however. He knew from experience that life teaches us lessons, and that if we don't learn from these lessons, we fail in our lives. He was in the process of failing a few of life's lessons when I met him. He was about 15 years older than I was at the time and told me that at some point I would reach a stage in life where I would "realize" that this was what life had to offer, and pipe dreams and fantasies of what might happen were only pipe dreams and fantasies. I was in my mid 20s and took his words to heart. I did learn from him that in our 40s and 50s we look around us and "realize" that our life is what we have made it, and we cannot "blame" anyone for our position or our accomplishments.
  3. The Peace Movement of the late 60s.
  Since I graduated from high school in 1971, I was on the "back end" of the Peace Movement, which galvanized the nation in the late 60s. In my Senior Year of High School, we attempted to "break the dress  code". Back when I was in school, there were strict "codes" which dictated that, for instance, a girl's skirt could not be a certain number of inches above her knee, and guys could not wear beards or moustaches. Up until my Senior Year, I was a perfect model citizen, but I started to grow my hair long and sprout a moutstache, and got together with some fellow students to " break the dress code" which we did, eventually, although we graduated, so we didn't get to reap the benefits of our efforts. I clearly remember getting up and speaking in front of the whole school assembly in my position as "Student Faculty Relations" Committee Chairman and talking about freedoms and the possibility of an open  campus.
  In retrospect, there were some drawbacks associated with the Peace Movement of the late 60s, but the activities of the stalwarts of the movement helped to forge my young awareness of the ideas of peace and love, and what we can all do to better ourselves and our situation in life.
  4. USC and Bureaucratic Bullshit. After being one of  the top 25 students in high school, and "writing my own ticket" for most of my young life, learning that I was just one of a bunch of fish in a rather large pond in college taught me a lot about "real life" as it does for most people who thought they were popular and smart in high school. Even besides learning that I was small potoatoes in school, I also learned about what I have always termed "bureaucratic bullshit", the grease that makes the wheels or reality turn round. We all had to take a class in school in which the main text was written by the department head, and of course his book was available in the student bookstore on campus. The class was mandatory, which meant that every student at USC had to own a copy of the text book. Above all events that had come before it, this taught me about real life and how everyone has to conform to certain models in society, no matter what the time or place.
  5. My Misanthrope. Living with my ex girlfriend Pat for three years had possibly the greatest negative influence on my life for all time. I fell in love with Pat without paying heed to the kind of person she was. (Manipulative, surly, and confused) I moved in with her  blindly, and learned from this experience that there are people who are not at all like me, and they make their own rules in life. I write about her often, and still keep in touch with her, although she lives 3000 miles from me now. (Which is a good thing.) I'm glad the relationship didn't last,  because it might have eventually killed me, but while it was happening, I was immersed in a life that was dictated by a kind of unknowable agony that seemed to get worse each year.

  I could go on and on, so I won't. Each "chapter' of my own life has been filled with causes and people who impact it. Each day is it's own novel of opportunity and possible failure. Each minute is a world of learning and enlightenment. Each moment is an epiphany.
  It's great to be alive.
   

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