Trying to relive one's life over again, avoiding the evident mistakes, hopeful in that good fortune will shine on this alternative envisioned path, seems a likely pursuit during one's lifetime, but especially in retirement when there is ample idle time for this sort of reflection. Much of what I do in this domain focuses on childhood and adolescence, also early adulthood, and it is of such a personal nature that I won't provide specific examples of it here. But there are some things I wonder about that can readily be explored out in the open without causing me personal embarrassment. I will do a bit of that below.
Of course, one can also do this sort of exercise with a focus on national politics rather than on oneself. My favorite one of these is imagining what if Gerald Ford hand't pardoned Richard Nixon, which from the perspective of winning the election in 1976 would have been the smart thing to do. If Ford had won that election, he would have been President during the Iran hostages crisis. If nothing else, this sort of exercise allows us to see how seemingly unrelated events have shaped our history, with apparently pernicious consequences.
Let me get back to the personal. I didn't do much writing in junior high, high school, and college. I did what was required by courses and every once in a while I would write a piece for a school publication. I remember that in junior high I had an essay in the Social Studies Magazine entitled Mayor Lindsay's Poker Game, but I can no longer recall the subject matter of that piece. I had other essays of this sort in high school, but the total didn't amount to that much writing. Given the outpouring of prose in this blog over the years, I have to wonder why that didn't start earlier in my life. Here I'm going to speculate on one of the causes being the mechanical aspects of writing, in particular my difficulty with handwriting, and what might have helped me to overcome that.
Somewhat later in my schooling, though I can't remember when, I abandoned cursive for printing. As an assistant professor writing economic theory papers, I wrote in pencil on yellow ruled pads, one side of the paper only and then with a line space for each line of text I wrote. The idea there was that in the proof reading if an error was spotted, the line space could be used to insert the correction. But I must say that the pencils and the yellow ruled pads were supplied by the Economics Department, needed inputs for research and teaching. So I was free to treat them as abundant resources. When I was living at home during junior high and high school, it would have been my parents who paid for the notebooks and pens or pencils that we used. This created an implied obligation to use these items with some prudence, though in spite of this obligation I was always sloppy with them as with other things.
Now a bit of my personal history that most of my friends don't know about. After having a difficult time emotionally during 10th grade, I needed to do something during the following summer that would occupy my time and get me out of the house. So, I ended up attending a secretarial school in Flushing to study typing. The touch typing skills I learned there eventually came to serve me well, after I got a personal computer and started to use it as a writing tool. The time lag in that was perhaps 18 years or so. In a similar fashion, the Fortran I learned as a senior in high school and again as a sophomore in college served as a foundation for understanding how to use Excel effectively for explicating microeconomics ideas. The time lag in this case was far longer. So I'm a big fan of developing foundational skills that might pay off, if only well into the future. But I never used the typing skills I learned that summer while at home, except for writing school papers, even though we had both a manual typewriter and an electric typewriter as well. I've been noodling around with why that was and the best I can come with now is that writing on my own then would necessarily have confronted my own tormented thinking. I didn't want to do that.
So, I've been wondering how my personal trajectory would have changed had I learned typing earlier, in junior high. It was required to take shop class then, which if memory serves was one period per week for an entire school year. (Perhaps the band class I took met for 4 periods per week to accommodate that period of shop class, but that's just a guess now as I really don't remember that.) In 7th grade I took woodworking as a shop class. In 8th grade it was ceramics. I didn't mind the experience but I can fully assert that those classes produced no long term benefits for me. What if in 7th or 8th grade I had taken typing instead?
Typing was tied to secretarial skills and with that there was strong gender bias with that at the time. Secretaries were women. At the secretarial school I attended after 10th grade, I believe I was the only boy in the class. That was no big deal as I didn't know any of the kids there beforehand and didn't stay in touch with any of them afterwards. If I had tried to take typing at JHS 74, however, I might very well have known some of the kids in the class and it might have raised a few eyebrows with some of them, and likewise with some of my teachers. That's easy enough to anticipate. Harder to get at is whether it would have been a mountain or a molehill. I don't recall this very well, but I believe at the time when I was writing a paper for school I would write it out by hand and then my mother would type it up. If that's right, I could have relayed that fact and said I wanted to control the entire process. Then typing for me wouldn't be preparation as a secretary but would instead be about better performing as a student. Whether that argument would carry the day, I don't know, but I think a case could be made for it.
Even with that, interacting with the girls in typing class who knew me might have presented some challenges. Yet it might have opened up some opportunities as well. My class was quite gender stratified, as exemplified by whom one hung out with in the schoolyard after lunch. I might have been able to cut through some of the gender stratification in typing class.
So, suppose I took typing as shop back in 7th grade instead of taking woodworking. Would I have felt a desire to use this learned skill thereafter? And if so, would it be for copying things written elsewhere or would it be for expressing my own ideas? I read books frequently then and by 8th grade I think I was subscribing and reading through The New Republic, a weekly magazine. I could have written reactions to some of what I was reading. That doesn't seem to be too much of stretch to consider, even if the intent was just to produce diary-like writing, rather than to publish the work.
There would need to have been an impulse for trying this. And there would also need to be some working through of the logistics in getting this to happen, as both typewriters were in the den, a room my mom used for her language tutoring.
Much later in life, I've found with the blog writing that I will stew over some ideas and keep stewing over them unless they find their expression in some way. Having a conversation with a friend about them is one way. Writing about them is another. Once the ideas have found expression, I can move onto something else. This is one of the rewards in writing for me that is quite apart from how a reader might react to what I've said. Conceivably, it is sufficient reward to make writing a habit, especially when there aren't enough friends to have those conversations with and/or when some of the topics are better kept private.
I'm going to close with a bit of self-deprecation. I learned at that typing school that I have weak pinkies, particularly the left one. On a manual typewriter, this meant that characters hit with the left pinky, particularly the "a" key, resulted in something that appeared below the line of the rest of the typing. This was a little discouraging. Would all these lofty ideas about writing be wrecked by my own physical ineptitude? Who knows? The back in time fantasizing tends to emphasize the possibilities but ignore the obstacles. Sometimes it seems real life does just the opposite.
