I ran across these pictures yesterday and thought I would take you on a time machine trip back a decade at a time to where and when they were taken.
2001
That September the Trade Center fell and we all know where we were that day. Tish and I were working together making flutes and my first novel, THE MARINER’S CURSE, was due to come out in a couple of weeks. Buddy and Debbie were still newlyweds. Tio was 3 and Kit was just 6 months old and everyone was getting along fine.
1991
33 years old and Tish and I were running our own flute business. Being business partners and working side by side was a tough gig. We’d just moved to New Hampshire from Toronto and Sugar was starting junior year at a new high school. Buddy was living with the biodad at the time and came to see us often.
1981
At 22, I’d been in Boston for 2 years and decided to quit my job at Powell flutes and move back to Canada. This was the second time I quit flutemaking permanently. Tish was 31 and raising her toddlers just 2 towns over from where I had been employed but we wouldn’t meet for another 2 years.
1971
My very first week of high school. I was 13 - a total daydreaming-broken-glasses-with-tape-and-messy-clothes kid that not even my friends from 8th grade wanted to know anymore. Tish had just finished college in Vermont and had an apartment in a town near Boston where she worked as a dental assistant.
1961
This is where the picture comes in. (It’s actually 1962...) That’s me at 4 waiting to see Santa at the local department store. My eyes are glued on my mother in case she decided to bolt and I’d never see her again. We lived in a suburb on the outskirts of Toronto that all these years later is now considered “downtown”. I was in nursery school that year and considered “so smart” that they skipped me to grade 1 because mom had taught me to read at home and I could probably tie my shoes.
The other picture is Tish in 1962 beaming away in her 8th grade formal dance dress. She was an independent teenager going on to high school that fall. Unlike me, everyone liked her and she was a grade A student.
We met 22 years later when I rented the house next door to her. She was a 33 year old mom of 2 and I was a starry eyed 24 year old idiot who had no idea what he was getting into taking on a family.
Let's wrap up by looking 10 years ahead to...2021
We’ll still be living in New Hampshire but musical instruments will be obsolete because of new computer sampling algorithms so I'll have to become a greeter for Spacely Sprockets. Doc will take his jet pack to highschool, Kit will be a rock star diva in Hollywood, and Tio will be the computer genius that put me out of work making flutes.
How did the corkscrew of your life unfold through the years?