A Year Ago....

Shit Howdy! Things have changed for me.

I'm reading a post on the Portland Sentinel website about this year's upcoming National Night Out festivities in Portland and I realize that was such a major story for me when I was working at the Sentinel last year.

Last year.....

I feel like I've grown in leaps and bounds from the person I was. I was so naive. I was so young and had so little experience with life and love and independence.

The journey I've experienced in the last year hangs nostalgically in my heart, bittersweet, bringing tears with it. I see a picture of him and he looks so damn good. I hear his voice and it brings everything back to me. No more, I say.

I'm staring 23 in the face and things are so vastly different. I've met great men. I have new friends and reconnected with dear old friends. She boxes me ferociously, and like the traitor she is, she's sweeter to my dad than myself, but I've got a new cat, a new member in our family.

I've come home to my roots. I've learned things about this city that I didn't know. I've gone to the House of Blues. I've heard Pat Green live in concert. I know the West Side street-scape in a way I didn't before I left. And I can also claim that my name dots the Los Angeles Magazine website here and there.

Where will this lead, I ask the stars.

On an assignment, I went to the Paley Center for Media and saw a screening of a film about Walter Cronkite's life. His life was amazing. He saw the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl, was a stringer in college for a major city newspaper in Austin, Texas. He was less than 25 years old by the time he was doing news on the radio and going overseas, flying in WWII planes and gunning at enemy aircraft. He was the first reporter to tell of news from the Allied occupation of North Africa. He saw the end of World War, the beginning of the Cold War, corresponded from Moscow, covered political conventions and protests during the 60s, reported on Watergate and the race to get a man on the moon.

And I think to myself, quite depressingly, that I'll never be the legend that Walter Cronkite was. I'm older than he was when he started working for a major media service. Meanwhile, I'm still trying to get my foot in the door enough to get paid (lowly too,) for my work.

While my life has just begun and I cannot predict the great challenges and turmoils and awesome moments I'll live through historically, I know in my bones that I am not wired as Cronkite was. I don't think there's any way my stomach is strong enough to report on war. I wouldn't be happy traveling around, covering international news, although there's a large part of me that wishes I could be happy doing just that.

No, my roots are too settled, cast too far into the ground. I did the traveling thing and I crashed and burned. I hold myself up to past experiences, which tether me to fear and the past, and yet those experiences are ever with me, because my ability to remember will never leave me. That is my curse; my tremendous ability to remember details and moments also links me to them, which means I'm never more than a memory away from the past.

I remember something I heard in a documentary some years ago; Julius Caesar was 25 years old and gazing at a statue of Alexander the Great. He started weeping and it's said that he proclaimed "I'm older than he was and I have yet to conquer the world."

At the time, I thought this was a stupid thing to feel; after all, these men were entirely different. One was Macedonian and lived several hundred years before the Roman Caesar did. One was of "royal" blood and the other was not. One lived in a monarchy and one lived in a "democracy."

But now, upon hearing about Cronkite's life I feel much the same way I imagine the first Caesar did. Will I ever be strong and brave enough to live the adventures I want to? Will I ever rub shoulders with the people I want to meet? Will I ever impact peoples' lives and change things for the better? Will I make a difference? Will I be remembered?

These are the things that drive me forward and hold me back. But I'm older and wiser now and I'm happy that the future remains dark to me; I don't want to know what I'm to become, I want to live every moment in utter surprise.