A Whole Lifetime
Do you ever turn a corner
and find your old self (own self)
(new)
standing there waiting
for you to catch up...
and mustard all over the front
of that little boy shirt sleeves?
Two events occurred recently that called to mind this verse from a piece I wrote back in 1999. Both involved friends I had not seen or communicated with in decades. Both events transported me back to places in my life I had not visited for a very long time. Both events had something to do with AIDS.
The first incident actually began several months ago when I did some online research for last year’s World AIDS Day Service of Remembrance and Hope and discovered an interview on an HIV/AIDS resource site with an old friend of ours, the actor Mark Patton. We got to be great friends back in 1979: made a cross country trip together—and even attended a fabulous open air Donna Summer Concert in St. Louis together. Mark went on to appear on Broadway and in the film Come Back To The Five and Dime Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean, though he is to this day still best known for his starring role in the cult film A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge. Somewhere along the way we lost touch with one another, though Steve and I always remembered the time we spent together with Mark with great fondness. From that interview, we learned that Mark has been living with AIDS for many years, and now lives and owns a little shop in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico.
On our trip to Puerto Vallarta this February, we stopped by Mark’s shop to surprise him, and over the time we were in town, had a great visit together. All three of us were a little emotional over the reunion, but then got down to the business of trying to catch up on the 34 years that separated us.
The second event also occurred while we were in Puerto Vallarta—just a few days after we saw Mark for the first time—though it was Facebook related and could have happened anywhere. As I was getting ready for bed one night, I noticed a private Facebook message had arrived from a friend I hadn’t seen since well before Steve and I met in 1978. Tommy was thrilled to have discovered me on Facebook because, in his words: “I’ve believed for 20 years that you died of AIDS because somebody, somewhere back there told me that and I took it to heart. So, call me wonderfully surprised to find that I was wrong.” In the following days, we messaged each other many times, and each in turn spent time online catching up on our work and our lives during the past almost 40 years.
Both events, especially because they happened so close together, coupled with the fact that I was on vacation and had the luxury of spending time in quiet contemplation, allowed me to take a good long look back at memories I hadn’t even remembered I had. Some of those memories, of course, of mutual friends who truly did die of AIDS a long time ago.
Life is full of stages, isn’t it? My mother used to just laugh and shake her head as she watched her four children grow up. “Oh that’s just another stage he’s going through,” she would say of the latest style or fad that would capture our attention.” Even after all these years, I’m sure she still thinks the same thing every time we call up chatting about some new interest or health craze or epiphany that has come to us.
Sometimes it is easy for us to keep our lives divided into little compartments: small boxes of time we can manage, or even hide from sight if they expose too much about who we are. Sometimes we are so caught up in the present, we forget about all the stages that shaped our lives and made us who we are today. My conversations with Mark and Tommy inspired me, and reminded me of the richness that comes when we take all those little boxes out of the closet, and look at our lives as one whole unit.
For the past 24 years CAMP Rehoboth has filled my horizon, increasingly so in the past decade. The CAMP Rehoboth website was the first place I sent Mark and Tommy when we were trying to catch up with each other’s lives. I have been passionately writing about CAMP Rehoboth for decades, and most of my words live within those pages. In the contemplative state that my old friends have inspired, I am reminded that there was a time before CAMP, and that there will come a time after CAMP—at least for Steve and me.
This past year, the CAMP Rehoboth Succession Planning Team completed its work. As part of the process, we studied the work done by all of the staff—both paid and volunteer—and we identified what it would take to replace any one of us. We created an emergency plan for dealing with the sudden death of any of us—especially in the case of something happening to Steve and me at the same time. We created a timeline for the yearlong replacement of the Executive Director, to be triggered by Steve’s announcement to the Board of Directors that he was planning to retire. We also created a checklist of things we needed to do in order to be more prepared for the day when that retirement comes, including technology advances and the cross training of additional staff in order to distribute responsibilities and share our knowledge base about the organization with others.
When these meetings began over a year ago, these conversations were at first very difficult, because they were things we really didn’t want to talk about. As founders of the organization, we want to see it succeed after we’re gone; at the same time, letting go can be extremely difficult. Time has a way, however, of changing the way we see the world around us. Accepting that there will come a time when the best thing we can do for the organization is hand over the leadership to someone else is the first stage of making it happen.
This is not an announcement of our retirement, but it is a reminder for us and for this community that that day will come. We will all do our best to be prepared.
In the meantime, I will continue to open up all the little boxed up memories of life, and because it is such an important part of my life, of CAMP Rehoboth. Mark and Tommy have reminded me of all the many people who walked the road that led us to CAMP Rehoboth in the first place: the friends who died of AIDS early in the epidemic and inspired an activist spirit within us; friends who appeared just at the right time in our lives when we needed a word of encouragement; a church that opened its doors and welcomed us just when we needed it the most; and a community who believed we really could make a difference just by creating a more positive environment for all of us.
Remembering to look at the whole of our lives is crucial to understanding who we are as individuals and as an organization.
Do you ever turn a corner
and find your old self (own self)
(new)
standing there waiting
for you to catch up…?
Murray Archibald, CAMP Co-founder and President of the Board of Directors of CAMP Rehoboth, is an artist in Rehoboth Beach.