On last nights How I Met Your Mother, Marshall returned to his daring childhood to kick his own unbeaten tail. It was that single moment we all have during an unwritten and unrehearsed journey called life; when making the wrong decision leads to a near impossibility to beat.
If you were given a single ticket to go back…where would you land? The only rule: what you change will affect the avalanche of events connected to its creation.
For instance, it would be extremely too simple to haul booty back to Billings and swipe every 8-track, 45 and album out of a wandering teens collection—more importantly, I’d yank the clock radio chord from the wall that fed the imagination of a sleepless night into believing he could be one of those long distant voices scratching his way across umpteen million miles of wide open radio space to gently land in someone else’s dream.
But to do that means…these words and your eyes wouldn’t meet.
Is it worth making a deal with the maker? We rewrite the rules of Monopoly so many times that when an outsider steps in to play, they feel completely bamboozled by what seemed to be clean enough rules to follow during earlier times of competitive struggle.
One ticket, a single moment…
Mr. Marsh was my Drafting III instructor—his Rollie Fingers handlebar mustache continues to haunt my longest deepest decisions—dropping his class from the high school curriculum would turn my architectural aspirations into a puddle of Montana mud. He busted me for designing a six bedroom dream house complete with four bathrooms, master suite walk-in closets, three car garage, tennis court and pool.
“We don’t draw dreams in my class. I train you to focus your mind on reality.” He sternly scolded while leading my right arm out of class. “Come back when you’re ready to understand that mechanical drawing is about machines and the parts that make them work. Until then find a different place to bend lines that create unwanted shadows.”
Being completely human, there’s very few who could stop at one. If given that golden ticket to climb on board the eraser train, what in your current life would you be willing to sell to gain access to a second and third trip? Knowing each time you returned, everything that became you meant everyone you loved could dissolve into nothingness.
Keg standing at the incredibly old age of 15—there’s no way such weekend stunts on a rolling hillside near Blue Creek, Montana would still have the ability to infect me today. What about when we woke up late one Sunday morning and needed to get to Lewistown for the drag races so Larry, Steve and I hopped into the bright orange Mustang and buried the needle never once touching the hot pavement…it was more like gliding. Surely, that lack of common sense has nothing to do with today…right?
Do you ever sit back and take note of how lucky you are to have gotten this far? Would it be worth changing…just once?
I’d never go back and take out the bike ride at the gym that introduced me to martial arts. Geraldo walked up and very confidently said, “How are your investments? If you aren’t taking care of your core interests there may not be a future in you.” What I put into those Americanized chapters ended up being why the heart doctor two weeks ago cleaned my slate claiming no scar tissue or physical evidence of there ever being a stoppage.
But this isn’t about great moments in victory. A single day sitting face to face with the eyes, ears, nose and mouth of the kid you once were during a time when decision making ended up controlling the rest of your life.
I bailed out of high school chorus because doing Barber Shop took my shyness and shoved it into overload. I wrote a book in the eleventh grade called Halloween 78 where three tragic things written about later came true. Band practice got out of control one night leading to me slamming the guitarist’s fingers in the car door. At 16, I took three different girls to a Van Halen concert and had them strategically placed inside the Metra where I could visit each of them during the show. Stupid! Stupid! Stupid!
The one ticket back I don’t want to own. I never got angry with my mother. I was far from being a momma’s boy…too rough and ragged way too early in the book. She won me over early, sitting in my bedroom listening to a little ten year old pretending to be a disc jockey. Turning around after every talk break she’d always remind me, “No matter how tough it gets in the business you’ll always have a set of ears willing to listen.”
arroecollins@clearchannel.com
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