Go Fish Galvez

Walking a prancing Tip late this afternoon, when it wasn’t quite so suffocatingly hot, into the nearby, shaded, historic neighborhood of Cedar Lawn (est. 1924), I chanced upon a great bumper sticker on the back of a car parked on the street:

“Remember Who You Wanted To Be”

Ah, yes, I remember, and had to smile…

I remember a young, bright, blue-eyed, curly-headed idealist and dreamer, childhood cartoonist, young musician, later would-be psychologist, philosopher, physicist, mathematician, and always, ever, ponderer of the big ideas. A genuine appreciator not only of the hardest of hard science but equally of the finest of fine arts, of symphony, ballet, literature, poetry, and all those uncategorized nuances of life that qualify, finally, as art. A cultural and geographic adventurer and an ardent, unrelenting challenger of the status quo.

That was who I wanted to be and that was who I was.

And maybe that was all of us, the last trickle of the Baby Boomer generation.

I do remember, fondly, this strident young woman with the blue eyes and curly locks. She, or at least some vestigial remnant of her, resides in me now. Tempered by time, inevitably, but by wisdom, too, which is the truest gift of life, still the spirited soul endures…