Postcards from the Funny Farm

I got that title from an old Alarm song. It’s a great tune with an even greater message for the visionaries among us in 2008.

Instead of waiting for others to be our inspiration, we have to be the inspiration to others AND to ourselves.

As you may have gathered from this series’ title, I grew up in Orange County. 45 minutes from Disneyland and 2 hours from the Mexico border. Nice living! When I moved up here to the high desert of California in August of 2002 I had nothing more than 300 bucks in my pocket and what seemed like a mystical job contract to teach public school. I left behind a rental apartment and everything else that had been “home.” I had decided some months earlier that a return to teaching was what my life and soul needed at age 33. You can read more about my transition back into teaching in my article entitled: Success and Relativity. Anyway, I didn’t mind the details of the move, I just knew this was my return to teaching and return to joy. It was as if I was in the story Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and the teaching job was my “golden ticket.”

The people I met up here, from the interview onward were magical. They saw the light in me and in turn I saw theirs. People offered to let me sleep on their couches, rent their condos, go out to dinner with them, set me up with women … note: I was single then … it was like out of a dream. The dream wasn’t so much about what they offered me though, it was about the light they shined into my heart. I remember thinking of the high desert as a magical place that no one in Orange County, where I grew up, could ever touch. Well, of course, I see now after nearly six years that wasn’t the case, it was merely my perception brought on by simple things people did.

The people were and still are magical but many have left the desert. One woman in particular who was instrumental in hiring me sufferred unspeakable loss when her son and his wife lost a baby in delivery. This world can be so harsh. She left the district and I don’t see her anymore. Others have retired and some have just moved on. I find myself sometimes asking: “Was the magic real? Where has it gone?” There you have the place to put my title: We are the Light.

In life we are lucky at times to be touched by the magic of others. We must never forget however that we have that same power to touch others. We see the light in people they often don’t see themselves. Let your words and actions pour light like water into the “vases” of people. Let them be better for knowing you. I’ll never forget the time my Grandpa had such an impact on me when he bought me a set of Callaway irons as a kid. I used to polish them nightly. Golf was a better game for me because of his generosity. That’s the kind of impact we should all have.

Remember also that the world is not always a mystical place. It is most the time, at its most complex level, just people walking on sand getting to their next destination. It takes people of vision, like you and I my friend, to to create the perception of magic.

The things that are eternal are actions and words you dream. Only you can start them. Only you can bring them back. Only you can keep them going. There really isn’t much to say on this except: GO AND DO!

An aside here at closing: Below are 4 of my family pictures. Each person in them “happened” post-desert … post-magic. Looking at them reminds me that home is where I probably need to shine the brightest, before I take on the world. Wouldn’t you agree?

Lorelle has a blog challenge this week to blog about a time when you felt “big.” I thought it was a perfect opportunity to write a memoir here on when I met two of my all-time life heroes.

The first one was Dave Sharp, ex-guitarist of the eighties neo-punk arena band: “The Alarm.” If you’re age 30 and above, you might recall some of their radio hits: “Sold Me Down the River,” “Rain in the Summertime,” “68 Guns,” “The Stand,” and a few others.

Here is one of their amazing videos from 1984, it still blows me away (check out the hosts’ mullets!)

I had every album memorized. I started listening to his music when I was 13 or 14 and learned all his guitar work by ear. When I joined my own band at age 16, I was throwing out chords and riffs I’d either stolen from him or adapted to my own style. But he was more than a guitar model to me, I identified with what he said in interviews and I tried to model much of my life after things he said either in the media or live in concert (I saw them live about 10-15 times).At age 23, I saw in the paper Dave was coming to town to do an acoustic show. I wanted to meet him personally. Not only because he was so cool, but because I wanted to hire him to play guitar on a single we were recording.

After the show I waited outside a while and soon, Dave emerged with a security guy. He had come out to talk to a few fans and sign some autographs. I met him then, gave him a tape of my music with the proposal inside and within a few weeks, his agent called me accepting my offer.Well, you can imagine the blissful events that followed. I worked with him several days in the studio that year and a couple years later we did another song together. Nothing much became of my music in the mainstream, but the experiences forever changed me. Rock n Roll means more to me than it ever did before. You can hear Dave on guitar on these two songs I wrote and recorded him below:

Talk to Me
People

The second connection I had with a hero was just a few months ago. I am a public elementary school teacher and as a result, I work to increase my students’ scores on the California Standards Test every year. Countless times since I started teaching I have gone to the CDE.ca.gov website and seen the Superintendent of Instruction, Jack OConnell, on the front page. Here’s picture of Jack in my classroom. To the right is Herb Fischer, Superintendent of San Bernardino County.

Jack is the top. Not too long ago, my Principal told me he was coming to visit due to our school’s incredible growth in scores. She told me he wanted to see “EDI” which is a style of teaching we have started doing and that I am a certified coach for. He came in and watched a lesson along with the local paper and all the Principals in the district. I got to meet him and we discovered we both went to the same college, California State University, Fullerton. Wow. It was truly a “big” moment for me and I will never forget the power of working hard for something and then getting recognized in that way.

Apart from the births of my children, those are 2 of my most biggest moments: “XXL.”

Could you blog about a time when you felt “big?”