Patterns and Parallels

 Patterns and Parallels

Removing the structure of a “normal job,” as retirement does, effects your life in a variety of ways, some of them rather unexpected. Among the most surprising, for me anyhow, is stumbling across behavioral patterns from my childhood, long neglected but now rediscovered like an old pair of shoes behind a bucket out in the garage, still functional, perhaps even the right size, but somehow just forgotten. 

These patterns were some that probably made me seem a bit odd to my peers in junior high school, perceptions to which I remained blithely unaware. Two cultural realities enabled these particular patterns. First, I lived close enough to school to ride my bike to school, and second, educational policies were still sufficiently rudimentary to permit me to ride home for lunch. It was what awaited me there at home that might well have raised eyebrows amid our version of The Harper Valley PTA.

No, nothing so obviously titillating as those revealed in Jeannie C Riley’s 1968 hit, but something which, on deeper examination could be seen as culturally more insidious - The World Book Encyclopedia! It was all there from aardvark to zyzzyza, untouched, unconsidered, and certainly unapproved by the local school board. You could easily slide straight from transportation to transgendered on the same page! Not that my editions from the 1950s would have contained “transgendered.” And I obviously exaggerate for editorial effect. In truth what drove me to the encyclopedia was simple curiosity. I would select a volume at random and with an equal sense of freedom, dive into a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and begin to read.

It was, I believe, those random readings that opened my mind to the idea that there were no boundaries between ideas. That each little lunchtime ramble could connect in someway to those that had preceded it and those yet to come. Perhaps had some “lesson plan” dictated that I start with aardvark and proceed in some orderly manner to zyzzyza I would have allowed that process to rein in my more flamboyant curiosity. Fortunately my mother was most likely reading her own novel, or was busy putting the ironing into the refrigerator - another story for another time. So I was free to construct my own amorphous notion of the ways in which structure and pattern found their way in existence.

Years later an equally intellectually liberated woman gave our young daughters an entire set of The Encyclopdia Britanica. We had many friends who would gaze at the impressive tomes and remark upon the seeming inappropriateness of such a gift for young girls. I would simply smile and and comment on the weather - assuming we were having some.