TERRY MOSHER
Bob Dylan’s speech at the MusicCares Charity Event last Friday was an all-timer. He was Dylan at his best as he rambled for 30 minutes on what music means to him and how he got to where he is. It was a truth-telling history and what music means in the truer sense, which he forcefully said his critics often didn’t get.
I get it. It also reminded me that truth is sometimes larger and better than friction. So here comes the truth.
I’ve had a lucky life that has taken me from the very small town of Portville, N.Y. to the West Coast and the reward of working as a writer of sports for almost 50 years now. You can’t get luckier than that.
While many of my family and friends have fallen by the wayside, in some cases tragically, I have emerged to continue my journey, which I believe is inspired and directed from the “other side.” I believe I’m here to complete a spiritual journey that will make me a better soul. That journey is not complete, although my time here is running out. I’ve got an expiration date unknown to me, but I believe it’s right around the corner.
You know your time is short when you get the most enjoyment sitting in your work space and looking out a big bay window and watching birds from big and graceful bald eagles to little humming birds mill about as they fly over and around the water. The eagles are sometimes harassed by crows, but that’s all right. No harm, no foul.
There are two big (and fat) raccoons that spend almost every day walking across the back lawn. They stroll as if they own the place, and in a way they do. Yesterday one of them – I’ll call him Big Daddy – stood up on his hind legs and stared me down. Take it easy big fellow, I thought, I’m just looking.
I’m in that phase of life where the body breaks down and when you drop something others are quick to assist you and pick it up, fearing that you can’t. And you know what? I can’t
It’s amusing how the different stages of life go. You go from a cute baby (even if you are not), to a pre-teen moving faster than the speed of light to the changing of the guard into those tough teen years.
I have to tell you this because it is true of almost all of us when we go from pre-teen to teenager. There is something in that change that flips your world upside down as easily as a knife slices through butter.
Growing up in Portville (I always say I have not grown up, but that’s a different story) I lived in a rural neighborhood that was incredible for its natural beauty from the Allegheny River to the foothills of the Alleghenies, which are now referred to as the Enchanted Mountains.
Us neighborhood kids – there were five of us, primarily – had that terrain to ourselves for years. Summer days were filled with outdoor actively from building log cabins to hiking over the mountain ridges, to walking the railroad tracks and playing on abandoned rail cars to climbing the walls of an abandoned rock quarry, to picking wild berries, including blue berries, to running through acres of corn, swimming at various swimming holes, kayaking the river, fishing the river, and biking back roads for parts previously unexplored.
But then a strange thing happened. We turned into teenagers and in blink of an eye the old neighborhood group was no longer. I moved out West in 1954 and would make an annual trip back to Portville and the first time I went back as a teenager I had to discover new friends. The old neighborhood gang was no longer a gang.
Two incidents illustrate this. I was on the Stream Valley Bridge that spans the Allegheny River. The bridge is just a couple hundred yards from our old home and as I stood looking over a rail on the bridge, looking at the fish swarming around a bridge pillar, one of the old gang members arrived on his bike. He circled around a couple times but either of us said a word. Soon he was gone.
Another summer me and another friend were hitchhiking along the road that runs through the town of Portville. We were heading to the big city of Olean, six miles away. We walked along the road with our thumbs out looking for a ride when we approached a former gang member. He was selling blueberries in front of the family house. As we walked past, he diverted his eyes downward and we did not speak.
I never saw members of the old gang after that. I know one of them died in 2008, I spoke to one of them by phone maybe 20 years ago, but I can’t locate the other three now. I don’t know if they are alive or dead, and it probably doesn’t matter. That, in itself, is sad to me, because those were good times and the good memories I have of that life stays with me. But that’s life. As we age, changes occur that often means leaving behind the old friends.
The next real change in life comes when we go from high school kids to the years immediately following those years. We begin to explore the world and we all do it differently. And those differences build a gap that grows larger as we move forward with our lives.
I like to say that what we were as high school students has no relationship as to what we are years later. I enjoyed my high school years, but they were also my dark years as I have written about before.
I was not anything like I was as a kid in Portville in my years in Ferndale, Wash., where I went to school. My classmates at Ferndale never saw the real me because of my dark years.
In Portville, I was a bright student, among the top 10 percent, and may have been the best athlete in our class, if not in the school. I was a good football player, a good basketball player and a good baseball player.
But in Ferndale I didn’t play any of those sports. My brother Dave, who came out west with us but stayed for less than a month, and then went back to Portville to finish out his senior year with his classmates, talked me up to the coaches at Ferndale about my basketball skills and I was expected to be a star.
It never happened.
I didn’t even turn out.
Sure, I played all three sports in pick-up games and even played semi-pro baseball once I got into college at Western Washington. But my dark ages blinded me to anything and I just wandered aimlessly without passion through those school days and years.
I regret not doing better in Ferndale. But I was not happy there and it showed in my daily life. I have no one to blame but myself for the way I was, and it certainly stunted my growth. It’s hard to know what would have happened to me if I had tried harder and did not go through those dark years. I believe that my life has followed at least in the last 25 years the spiritual journey that was laid out for me from the beginning. But for about 30 years I was off-course and lost.
If I could guess, I think I probably would have been a good athlete at Ferndale, probably better in basketball and baseball than football because we had a great bunch of guys who kept Ferndale a football power for my last two years there.
I could also have been better in class. I don’t remember opening a book at home during my high school years. I was a C student that should have been at least a B student.
As I said above, it’s kind of amusing the different stages of life. For many years I was known as “Mo”or “Mosh”, but when you hit around 50 you start to being called Mr. Mosher. Then about 15 years later it goes to “Hey, you look good” even though you know you don’t. When I get that catchphrase and it’s a woman, I ask, “Where were you 50 years ago?”
The next to last stage of life is when you are sitting in a chair because it’s too hard to stand up and people come around and pat you on the back without saying you look good.
Then you get to the age where people are quick to assist you when you drop something. “Here, I will get that for you.”
Thanks.
The last stage is when you disappear from the radar. You no longer go out and are homebound. People whisper about you, if they whisper at all. Many have already forgotten you and have moved on.
Then comes the obituary.
“Hey, did you hear Mosher died?” a guy says.
“Who was he?” the other guy says.
So it goes.
Be well pal.
Be careful out there.
Have a great day.
You are loved.