Week 11: Land Rover Discovery

The Matchbox I selected for this week is about adventure, beginning with dreams of a park-rangery, outdoor living, brown-bear-you-get-out-of-that-garbage-can adventure. (The selection is also about being aquamarine, my color of choice.)

When I finished high school in 1981, I had plans of becoming a park ranger. I became an English teacher instead, and soon thereafter moved into the editorial world, a far cry from patrolling trails and giving tours of Old Faithful. I'm not sure what happened -- must have read my class schedule incorrectly.

Between the Nissan Skyline and the Hollowback (Week 10's car selection), my +7 year run as an editor at a company, part of an overall +16 year run in the editorial world (+18 if I count proofreading for a print shop), came to a close, and now I'm revisiting those park ranger thoughts.

Not in the sense of chucking it all in at age 47 and becoming a park ranger, though. 

The parts I am revisiting are the ideas of choice and adventure.

As a kid, job thoughts are not based on limitations, but on the premise you just pick what you want, like from a menu, and it is the dessert menu -- employment aspirations from my children over the years have included rock star, race car driver, video game designer, dragon, basketball player, fix-it guy, spy and actor. 

Then you grow up, make a bunch of decisions, respond to a bunch of circumstances, and get swept away by a whole bunch of external factors, and somewhere, amid the responsibilities and drudgery, many of us (most of us?) lose that sense of adventure and that feeling of choice.

Somehow, blessedly, as a result of a bunch external factors,  a bunch of circumstances, and a whole bunch of decisions, I've managed to rekindle that spirit of choice and adventure, and man, what a great feeling.

I say spirit of choice and adventure, because the responsibilities and the realities remain, as does the hard-fought platter of experiential hors d'oeuvres I've gained over my life that are too tasty to toss out, so going the rock star route at this stage probably isn't going to work for me, but what has changed is how I view the future, and how I view making a living.

What a phrase -- making a living. 

Tell you what, let's revisit this topic down the road, say Week 31, and I'll give you an update on how I'm doing.

For now, I'm living life and rediscovering the adventure of the story and the story of the adventure.

Right now, I'm living my own aquamarine Discovery.

------------------------------------

For me, adventures and stories are almost the same, so below are five random stories from my career retrospect so far:

• Stuffing envelopes for New York's Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) for invites to a gala featuring a who's who of famous folks (this was a part time gig, and for a 20-something Ohio bumpkin this experience was astonding.)
• Proofreading proofs and plates at a shop printing pornographic video/sex toy catalogs. I even got to make sure the black dot hiding certain areas was placed correctly.
• Cooking at the historic Old Port Tavern in Portland, Maine when it burned in the mid 80s. (The fire had nothing to do with my cooking, thank you, and it is not related to "The Great Fire of Portland" of 1866.) 
• Manning an answer line for a company that sold television/electronics remote controls -- did this actually happen?
• Age 14 -- sitting in a cement bunker hand-loading clay pigeons into a manual skeet flinging machine, listening to someone yell "PULL!" and hearing the shots fired over my head.

Matchbox Land Rover Discovery 8 of 10 of Matchbox 2010 Outdoor Sportsman line.


Photograph of car courtesy of Dominic Buccilli.