Mikes Thoughts

letting things go and be

Last night over some beers I did this occasional search on someone important to me. I found his obituary in the local paper where we met so long ago. Where I worked for years as an archeologist at a few places. I just stopped. Realized I had lost track of a person still so important and significant in my life. Still.

His passing did not shatter me and I am not grieving or wishing things to be different. It’s like his life was this thing that stretches back for me to the 1980s. He gave me the desire and fueled it to be an archeologist. To work in the beautiful expanse of the western Mojave Desert. I went to school in New Mexico with my then wife. Did a masters degree there. Came back and worked years on projects for environmental companies. I would get full time work as a project archeologist at Edwards Air Force Base. We got together on weekends because it was never enough to do some archeology.

All the years boiled into a memory of my ex wife then pregnant with our son out doing a survey in the desert. Much later, my daughter came to be. I would take my daughter to meet him. He had no idea I had a daughter but his opener to me was not how much he missed me. Instead he simply asked,

Where you been Mike?

Then he looked at my daughter and hugged her and told her,

I had no idea you even existed.

This questions and words came to me last night. Where indeed. Years passed and I’ve been here and there. I left archeology and moved into IT. I left after 20 some years in IT. My life a shambles. Much like I have concluded IT to be.

So I sit with coffee and find I want to feel a thing. This not sadness. Yet not happiness. A thing in my life became the past. Yet it had been for years. No guilt.

I would say if you have someone in your life that touched you try to not let them go. I used to have photo albums of him and us. Doing the archeology in the Mojave. Enjoying a beer and pizza. None of this is let go. The photos are forever gone like the relationship with my wife. Perhaps she destroyed them. I will never know. And it’s ok. I realized I had this person for so long. Every life diverges. Finds a new path. So the seminal question of where I’ve been came back to me over the beers.

I’ve been and done. And will continue. Like this blog and my writing. And journaling and finding and losing. That’s life. I’m blessed and cursed with a memory of even small things he once did or we did. I’ll love them and love them again.

Meanwhile I’ll take a little break here. Give some room to where I’ve been and where I go. Cambodia is my home. The life before is no less my life. It’s the learning. The learning to do and be.

Don’t ever let that get away from you. See you when I find myself or lose it all again. I don’t know when.