Since my craniotomy, I’ve noticed a subtle way in which I’m pretty sure I experience time differently. I think of it as “the lazy river” effect. When my daughters were little, they loved to go to water parks. Now the whole idea disgusts me, but back then, I was into whatever made them happy. One time, a neighbor dad and I took our three daughters to a hotel/water park complex at the Mall Of America and made a 24-hour event of it — water park, father-daughter “fancy” dinner, more water park, father-daughter all-you-can-eat buffet breakfast, more water park. I remember two forms of sensory abuse above all else from that adventure—ear-splitting noise and the nauseating smell of chlorine.
I guess the modern, manufactured lazy river is a slow-moving, highly chlorinated, inner tube traffic jam version of a Louisiana Bayou tributary, without all the gators and snakes, way to float away an afternoon. My post craniotomy version is just floating along in a river of time letting time take me wherever she will. It’s a distinctly different version of time than I was living in pre-craniotomy.
This brings me to a different memory.
At Sandi’s, I’m a few hundred yards from the shores of the mighty Mississippi River as she flows between Minneapolis and Saint Paul, Minnesota en route to the Gulf of Mexico. Nearly fifty years ago, during the Summer of 1972, I had a very different, and a very much more profound version of the “lazy river” effect, slowly and unforgettably shaping my life forever to come.
I paddled a canoe, along with thirty-eight other Twin City’s junior high school students, and two high school biology teachers, and two university biology grad students, all together we paddled seventeen canoes, from near the source of the Mississippi (near Itasca State Park) to somewhere north of St. Louis, MO.
Now that was a lazy river Summer to remember.
Somehow, unexplainedly, four biology teachers never seemed to comprehend the challenges they would face guiding thirty-eight, pubescent teens on a summer-long camping trip down the Mississippi.
Luckily for us.
To my knowledge, only one roll of film was ever taken of that magical trip, by my dear friend Nancy, pictured further below with her summer boyfriend we jokingly called “cue-ball”. They were the cutest.
None of us really knew one another when the summer began. Within weeks, most of us had paired off.
Don’t you imagine biology teachers could have seen that coming? Needless to say, that experiment was never attempted ever again.
That’s me, in the far back, staring closely at something. I’m in the same cut-offs I left home in and never took off all summer. Just to prove to you I was there.
