The Picture of My Youth
In a few hours from now, my old friend from high school, Tom Wohlmut will arrive for a two day stay with his wife Brenda as they make their way west from Santa Fe, heading for their new life in Australia. Tom is one of two friends I can say I have retained from my youth and I have many fond memories of our times together in Rome during our high school years. While both of my friends from high school were as close to me as they were due to our common love of motorcycling, the passion that Tom had before motorcycles came into the picture and that he has turned into his life’s work is photography. Back in Rome it was mostly black & white photography and he used to develop all his own film and print his own photographs. In some ways, I think that makes him a true photographer who knows how to capture images and turn them into art. These days with digital photography and a higher and higher quality camera in every smartphone, I sense that something has been lost in the process. I’m sure all of Tom’s work these days is in the digital realm and that he rarely, if ever, comes in contact with film any more. But I feel that he is probably a better photographer for all his experience in the darkroom just like race car drivers who have served their time under the hood are better drivers for it.
Tom introduced me to photography back them and he showed me how film got developed and pictures printed. We spent enough time together in the dark room for me to be familiar with the process and be able to do the rudimentary things needed, but also to understand how much more Tom knew about it and how much artistry was truly involved in good photography. Everywhere we went in those heady days of high school amidst La Dolce Vita, Tom always had his Nikon camera and he became the unofficial historian of our life and times. A few years ago Tom gave me a small photograph of a tree-lined Roman road that invokes the best of my memories of Rome. Where others might think of the Spanish Steps, the Coliseum or the Via Veneto, I have an image of a tree-lined Roman road through the golden countryside of Italy. It could have been in Rome, elsewhere in Lazio of up in the Tuscan hills. It didn’t really matter. The ride was what mattered to me most and those trees along whatever road we were riding on defined that ride.
I will take Tom through my study, which I share with very few of our guests, not because I am jealously protecting it, but because it feels so personal that I think others will find it rather cluttered and meaningless. But I somehow feel like Tom will see all the mementos and pictures differently, especially when he sees his own photograph in one of the corners. Looking at the walls this morning, I saw a story of my life as told through my artwork and memorabilia. Its an interesting way to assess your life because we all have only so much wall space and thinking about what you value enough to grant valuable and scarce wall space seems meaningful.
When I do Zoom calls, like I did this morning, people can see behind me at what is on my walls. Unlike certain cable news pundits that carefully pose books and knickknacks behind them for effect, I just accept whatever is behind me into the picture. It so happens that I have these big faux film reels on a wall to my right and catch most of the comments from my audience. People ask if I’m a film buff, which I am. But they never see what I stare at in front of me, which is heavily dominated by motorcycling, both obvious and, like the tree-lined Roman road, implied to me.
Motorcycling is by far the major passion of my life. I had a short hiatus from motorcycling for a few years after college and until I settled into my suburban lifestyle. Since then, I have had anywhere from one to five motorcycles in my life. In the early 1990s when I bought a home in Utah, I started riding out west. It reminded me on the high desert, of those Roman golden roads. I grew to love the rides through the canyon country and the high desert. In many ways, the riding around this hilltop is even more like those Roman roads. Thanks to my neighbor’s Tuscan winery obsessions, the street up to my house is lined with tall Cyprus trees that are very reminiscent of the Roman countryside. I find myself wondering if I will be able to convince Tom to throw a leg over and go for a ride. i keep two motorcycles for just such an occasion. I’m guessing I will cause some angst with that suggestion, especially if he has not ridden in a very long time. I just think it would be fun to take a quick ride together for a old times sake.
My other friend from high school, Bobby, is someone who collects old European motorcycles at his Florida vacation home. A few years ago I gave him an old Laverda that I had bought for nostalgic reasons. That sits in Florida amongst his Moto Guzzis, BMWs, BSAs and Trumphs. Bobby over to tinker with the old bikes, but I sense that he rarely rides them. I’ve suggested that he should fly out here and take a ride with me some day, but that offer has remained in a vague world of half-serious offers that will probably never be realized.
I do not know how long I will ride motorcycles. I feel perfectly competent to do so at this stage of life even though I ride less and less often. In two weeks I will be astride a Honda 750 (strangely enough, my dream bike when I was in high school, but now a smaller substitute for my BMW 1250), riding around Nova Scotia and the Maritime Provinces. It will be interesting for me to see how a week of riding in a very different, but hopefully pleasant, environment will feel to those old joints and bones. It may well define my degree of interest in doing any more long rides like this. It will be my first fly-and-rent ride since we went to Turkey in 2019. I sense that the difference between being 65 and 70 might or might not be meaningful in how that feels. The trip will be 1,300 miles spread over eight riding days. 164 miles per day on average with the longest day being 257 miles should not be too grueling, but we’ll see.
I think we all have pictures of ourselves in our head from our youth. I have a few vague shots from Latin America, more childhood images from Wisconsin and Maine, but most of my crisp and photographic memories stem from my time in Rome, when it was Tom and the Roman roads that gave me my inspiration. Now a days, I have, like most people, a smartphone with over 9,000 photographs. Some are just convenient mechanisms for remembering things like where we parked in a large lot somewhere, some are cute grandchild shots, and a few are important reminders of the things that I love the most. I can sell the motorcycles, I can move from here to there, I can even accidentally erase my smartphone photo file, but I can never lose the pictures of my youth that are forever etched into my brain and, indeed, my soul.