Over at Brick, my old Arkansas buddy Ben has neatly summarized yet another strange time in my life: My participation in Mallets Aforethought, the newspaper croquet team (posts: 1 | 2 ). And this was no back yard croquet deal, either: This was Real Croquet, the kind that is supposed to be played on manicured greens, a game that combines billiards with chess. There’s none of that foot-on-the-ball nonsense in Real Croquet, and the strategy of moving your ball around the court — and blocking your opponent — is a real skill.
I miss that time of my life a lot, although I suspect I am romanticizing it (for one thing, I was constantly broke and living on a ridiculous salary, but uncertainty over rent money seems sort of quaint in hindsight instead of terrifying). Between the Mallets, and my old band Nun of the Above, and other elements of my life that I can’t discuss because my wife sometimes reads my blog, I had a remarkably wonderful time in the back half of my 20s.
Sometimes I think about going back to Little Rock, where the lifestyle fit me much better than the Washington work-is-all life ethic, but then I remember: That was then. Today’s Little Rock isn’t the city, and doesn’t have the people, of the 1980s. The Mallets era was a great moment in time, but time moves on.
I don’t know if it is the birthday that just pasted, or my folks selling the house we lived in since 1979 in suburban Dallas to move to another house in a northern suburb (Frisco, TX), but we’ve talked alot about “home” lately.
Waco, TX was the same for me because I was working while at Baylor and constantly broke – not newsman broke, but working as a DJ in Dallas & Austin bars broke. I didn’t get newsman broke until CNN and C-SPAN in Washington. We would cook burgers and drink cheap beer on Sunday nights to make the weekend last a little longer – playing horseshoes and folks making music and enjoying being 19-21 and immortal.
And then Washington DC, were I learned that being broke in an expensive city, and that you need to examine your life choices when you think hill salary is an improvement from media pay!