Every inch of physical space is imprinted with history. Every moment leaves its mark on this space. The people who passed through. Their hopes, disappointments, joys, sorrows, elations, horrors, successes and failures. It’s a many-layered, physical and emotional holographic history.
Over decades, this history piles up like the geology on an exposed mountainside. Touch a spot on the rock and you connect with everything that came before. Like oxygen, we can’t see it, but we know it’s there. Specific spaces are magnetized to specific people who keep returning to these places over and over.
The inch I’m excavating today is on the lower railing next to the stairs outside Cedar Manor Elementary School. The geologic time is 1965. Third grade.
If elementary school taught me anything, it was how to read a clock. In fact, I became such a student of time that I kept one eye glued to that classroom clock all day, every day, from kindergarten through sixth grade.
If one dog year equals seven people years, then one school day equals 70 student days.
The time-space continuum is diabolically tilted against third graders. During class, the clock’s red second hand crawls as if fighting through molasses. During recess, the second hand spins like a window fan. It’s unfair, but no one can change the laws of childhood physics.
For 1,200 days, I endured waiting for that second hand to hit 3:00 PM. The bell rang and I’d explode from that classroom like Coca-Cola from a shaken bottle.
I flew outside, grabbed that railing and slung myself one-armed up onto those steps that led home. This was my daily moment of elation.
I return to this place to recapture that 8-year-old’s elation. I love that feeling. How much of life is lived trying to recapture a magical feeling? The movies we watch. The things we buy. The places we travel. The clothes we wear. The people we visit. The music we play.
I return to this place to show that 8-year-old what lies ahead for him. What his choices will look like. Did he follow his dreams or did he compromise? Was it all worth it?
I return to this place to thank that 8-year-old for surviving all those school days. All those lawns mowed. All those newspapers delivered. Losing his mother. Going through puberty. The confusion of girls. Thousands upon thousands of workdays. Joys and sorrows, failures and successes. In my mind’s eye, he’s still innocently smiling, despite a lifetime of experience about to fall on his head.
Returning here is paying my respects to that little boy who did so much to make me the man I am today. I’m overwhelmed with waves of gratitude that I was brave enough and persistent enough to fulfill that little boy's dreams. I feel worthy of him. I feel thankful for him.
I return here because nothing feels better than hope and achievement blended together, standing in the past, experiencing it in the present, that once was the future.
Then my wife touches the railing.
I flash to a scene in Richard Bach’s love story “The Bridge Across Forever.” His wife touches the gate at his childhood home. Time compresses and two worlds converge – the world of little Richard holding the gate, wishing for a soulmate, and the world of elderly Richard bringing her back as reality. Past hope and present achievement entwined within the same space.
Suddenly, too much love, too many memories, too much emotion, flood too small a space.
I cry.
And the railing’s holographic history adds yet another layer.
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Mike Johnson made the journey from jobs to freelance writer to entrepreneur to passive income and early retirement. Now he teaches others how to skip right to passive income and early retirement at WorldsBestWriter.com .