Geek Rant vs The Summers of Memory

Greetings Geekranters!

 Its snowing outside, in case you’re interested. Well there’s snow on the ground at least. Its getting hard to keep track these days. Snowstorm after snowstorm seems to fly across the western United States and batter Wisconsin against Lake Michigan. The wind blows and the snow drifts, icicles are everywhere and frostbite is a real worry. I think it looks equal parts beautiful fairyland and nightmarishly post apocalyptic landscape out there. Wisconsinites, on the other hand, merely use it as an excuse to use their deck as an extra beer cooler during parties. Come to think of it, I can do that, I have a deck after all, but you wouldn’t know that, I haven’t told you. 

So I haven’t written for a while. I’ve been a little busy. Life has intervened. Kelly and I moved into our first house, I finally passed my driving test, we were leaders on a youth retreat, we hosted my wife’s family in our still half put together house and all in the last three months. Its amazing how life seems to happen all at once and then, other times, it seems to take forever for something to change. 

So I’m writing this from my “office” in our new house, (well, new to us, it was actually built in 1979, which happens to be the same year my parents were married) the snow is supposed to be falling at some point tonight and I’m wondering whether we’ll have to dig our driveway out in the morning or whether it’ll be deep enough to snowblow. These are the things, I’m finding, that homeowners in the American Mid-West are concerned about.

 Wisconsin has been pretty bad this year, its been the worst I’ve known it anyway, Minnesota has been hit harder, I’m sure my in-laws will say, but that’s to be expected. I have started to realise that Wisconsin looks down on Illinois for not being as wild and cold and Minnesota tells Wisconsin that it has no idea about real cold and then North Dakota tells them all to “stop moaning, at least people live in your states, I’m so frozen, I’m Antartica’s understudy”.

Winters like this are not totally uncommon in this area of the world and most of the people just seem to take it in their stride. I tend to think I’m not adjusting to it at all until I see some social media post from the UK, worrying that the solitary centimetre of snow will bring the nation’s roads to their knees; I had more snow than that my first ever commute, as a driver, home from work. 

Winter, is respected here though. Frostbite being a very real possibility then you’re not going to catch anyone staggering home from town drunk, wearing their nice jeans, a Ted Baker shirt and a pair of Timberlands and then passing out in the town park on the way. Its not that people here don’t party in the winter, its just that they do it in a good Ice Fishing shack, with some protection from the elements. 

Winter has me thinking about so many things. I think a lot, as anyone who knows me will tell you, probably too much. I’m also making an attempt at being a writer and maybe it goes with the territory, isn’t writing after all just the communication of thoughts onto paper? Memories given physical form and captured onto the ivory landscape of the page. 

Winter leads my mind down all the pathways of my past and all the places I have seen and the things I have done since I’ve moved here. This is probably the worst winter that I have ever seen in this place and I’m thankful to say that I’ve dealt with it quite well, at least I think I have.

Winter has me thinking about summer and all the things that we saw when we drove the length of California and Oregon. Redwoods to Surf Meccas, Portland to Los Angeles and everything in between. Right now I see, in the snapshot of memory, the sun twinkling on the waters of the San Francisco Bay just as I mentioned in my last post. 

That moment, stood looking over that bay, seemed to last for forever. Etched in the seeming eternity of the minds imagination. There are always new things to see and new experiences to be had, but there are instances that are forever new in our recollections. My wife could have done without the unique experience of driving in San Francisco traffic though.

The San Francisco Bay area is the second most densely populated part of the United States, trailing only the huge metropolis of New York for the sheer mass of humanity packed into such relatively small confines of verdant hills and azure waters. It also has some of the worst traffic that I have ever seen, both driving on the roads and making our way through the streets.

If Winter has me thinking about what summer is like here on these American shores, it also makes me flash back to the summers of my youth. A multiple of British seaside resorts melding into one, fused together within the alchemy of memory.

Back then, hoping for sunny days, swimming in the sea with my sister, the other sister already developing her love of lazing on the beach, my brother refusing to touch the ocean bottom because he’d read too many books about sea dwelling creepy crawlies. Tacky souvenirs, we insisted on buying with our pocket money, never seemed worth it on rainy days back home and back at school. Those days when it seemed like half of Britain was at the seaside, before everyone started going to Benidorm for fish and chips under Spanish skies with no worry of the threat of English rain.

If there could have been a perfect expression of all our childhood dreams, a place where it never rained, with a hundred tacky storefronts selling souvenir shirts by the truckload. If that place had existed, it would have been San Francisco on the second day that we were there.

 If there was a place that could have captured my childhood longing to look out on a perfect blue sea under a cloudless sky and do nothing for entire day but gaze into aquatic eternity then it would have been Santa Barbara. Its funny how what happens now is still so connected to what happened then. How in truth those childish longings never truly go away and as broken and beaten as we think we are, somewhere, deep inside, we are as innocent and as carefree as we ever were in the halcyon days of youth.

Winter has me thinking about summer, which has me thinking about today and tomorrow, the future and the past, who I will be and who I was. This winter has been full of busyness, a multitude of life events that I could write a book about.

 It seems the last few months have been full of trying to catch my breath, trying to work out what it all means, snow falling on Mid-western streets, sun beating down on California’s West Coast Paradises; a history of British countryside holidays remind me that just as the weather changes from season to season, so my heart grows and changes from place to place. Maybe it took me moving 4,000 miles to truly understand what that means.

So I’m hopefully going to be writing a lot more as I try to understand what all of this means to a British boy cast free into this ocean of Transatlanticism. I’m going to finish the story of our trip to California, that I dropped so unforgivably last year, I might tell you about our house, then again I might not. I might let you know about my driving tests and my truck. (yes I drive a truck, no I’m not developing a love of Nascar and Garth Brooks). I might write about a lot of things that I haven’t thought of yet but there is one thing that I am determined I will do. I will write.

So as the snow falls out my window tonight, I tell you that my hibernation is over… Till next time…

Good Bye, Geekranters.