When we had our TV just barely a year a new TV show came on that blew my mind away as an eight year old. It was "I Led Three Lives". Wow, what an insight to the world. This common ordinary guy had not only his life with his wife and kids in the sub-burbs but was a spy and a counter-spy too. OK, it was a lousy show by today's standards and Herb Philbrick wasn't such a big hero in real life. I really dug his secret room however.
But the concept it instilled in my undeveloped temperament is that someone could be more than one thing. People in that era gave you one thing to be, and that was it. One of my later mentors, a child of the 40's, was very fond to saying "You can only have one thing." By eight years old I had decided that wasn't true.
Life has proven me correct. I have had five distinct lives up till now. Some by choice most by serendipity. Right now I'm working on number six. In many ways this is one I like the best. Now when I say different lives I mean DIFFERENT! One did not blend into the other. There was no flow of events. Only abrupt ends, chasms crossed, 90 degree turns.
My wife of 41 years has stood by me for three of the six, although she wasn't to sure about it sometimes.
It was about ten years ago that I discovered I was only surfing the waves of history not making them, not plowing through them. So many of those who were with me in each of my lives are dead and gone now. Many died while we were together in that particular life.
Sometimes I hark back to the lines by Robert Frost:
"Lord if you will forgive my little jokes on thee,
I will forgive thy great big one on me."
What were the lives you say?
1. Farm Boy See-er
2. Small Town-er
3. Religious Advocate and Missionary-Visionary
4. Warrior Killer
5. Social Justice Advocate-Architect
6. Retired-Disenfranchised-Disconnected-Wanderer
Of course a core of me transcended each life, but it was altered strongly by them.
When I read the "Forth Turning" I began to see my times and my lives in another context. It was enlightening.
So tell me about your"lives" has there be a logical sequence, chaos, serendipity?
What's next do you think?
3 comments:
I watched that as kid also. Herb Philbrick (Richard Carlson) was the guiltiest looking person..until
Nixon came along. Upon checking, we find that all the scripts were personally approved by J. Edgar Hoover, outlandish as some of them were. And it was a favorite show of a young impressionable Lee Harvey Oswald. In his other lives,
Carlson's career peaked in 'King Solomon's Mines' with Stewart Granger and Debrah Kerr, then subsided into the B-list genre of the times with 'It Came From Outer Space', The Creature From The Black Lagoon' and 'Magnetic Monster'. (I saw those in one of
my several lives)...:)
I was hoping all the talk about "The Fourth Turning" would bring out a story about your personal turnings. I've been pondering my own quite a lot these days. I haven't sat down and made a list and really looked for the major turnings, but here's what's off the top of my head:
1. Smart kid in school, sheltered in small-town life.
2. Break-away college student.
3. Fatherless college student/young career woman-beginning journalist/secretly wild woman on the side.
4.Detour into state government.
5. Return to graduate school in journalism, rapid rise to the pinnacle of my career.
6. Threw it all away, basically.
7. Suffering the consequences and waiting for the next moment of serendipity which I know will come.
That's probably more than my share.
Trying to distill one's life is an interesting experience. Often it is not easy for we tend to not be able to see the real differences between divides. Had you ask me to list my "lives" a decade ago, it wouldn't have looked anything like this.
"Herb Philbrick (Richard Carlson) was the guiltiest looking person."
Amen
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