COLUMN: New year brings quarter-century blues
Yikes, it’s 2005? Let’s see, that’s both hands, both feet, carry the five and I’ve been here 25 years; double yikes!
One year at a time, one year at time; it is as elemental and just as scary as putting one foot in front of another on a tight rope. Stay one more year and you might fall. Look down and you are liable to get nauseous. Waking up and finding out that you have outlived your biological necessity and your employer wants to give you a commemorative blanket in appreciation for all those years of service.
Though I have been an apologist for the valley life and the inertia it inspires, lately I have been thinking that staying in one place so long is deleterious. I mean listen to me; I’m starting to use words like deleterious. I’m not even sure what deleterious means in this context.
I know that age is just a number but when that number and your weight start to exceed the weekly salary of your first job, the exponential inevitability sinks in. Mine eyes have seen the coming of the gory of the lard. See? There I go again. I’ve sunk to puns.
I know that drinking isn’t the answer but it does help you forget a lot of the questions. I know where the bodies are buried. I know all the first wives. I know the drunks who were saints and vice versa.
When you stay in one place too long you see too much – old geezers trading up and trophy wives, too many cars you recognize when you drive by the AA parking lot, white trout in First Dam, AJ Simmons and Mark Hoffman both blowing themselves up; Mormons, morons and everything in between; Democratic despots and shady characters of all political ilk; toupees, mistresses and mid-life cars; the ones that came out and the ones that should have; too many times going around the room to introduce yourself, chemotherapies, pregnancies, affairs of the hearts and flesh and put off dreams, evil schemes, awkward glances, office romances; the new guy who has really great ideas, the next new guy that has really great ideas and the newest new guy that has really, really great ideas; typewriters to CPM, IBM, Windows, WordStar, WordPerfect and back to Word; clothes swapping gender neutral English majors and more than my fair share of landscape architects; the flood of ’83, strip clubs, failed brew pubs, countless failed clubs, Elwin Allred letters, snotty editors and 25 years of ugly Christmas sweaters.
If I stay even longer I’m sure I’ll get a 55 gallon barrel of ice cream, giant cheese wheel or something worthy of years of forbearance but maybe I get them to send it to the Peace Corps. instead of straight out telling them to get me off that list !
Longevity is not accomplishment any more than perseverance is a love. Thank you all for persevering all this years.
Dennis Hinkamp says his many years in Cache Valley will be complete when Elwin Allred officially calls this column “more liberal flapdoodle.”