Gains & Gleanings: The view from here
In 1989, I left Germany, and the U.S. Army, and headed stateside.
While on a short stayover in the ol’ hometown, Teressa and I got engaged.
She headed back to university in Michigan, and I headed to San Diego to see what I could do about forming a half-decent rock band, knowing Teressa would follow in a few months.
I moved in with my high school friend Michelle and her mom on Point Loma, sleeping in a closet under the stairs leading to an upstairs apartment.
My first outing with Michelle as she introduced me to the city I’d call home for a decade and a half was stifling and a bit scary.
The nighttime Pacific fog had rolled in, and we didn’t know it until we were in Ocean Beach with visibility down to about 10 feet. We came to a complete stop on a four-lane highway, unable to see anything, hoping that no daring soul would fly out of the dense mist and rear-end the car.
After a few minutes, a small breeze gave us another 40 feet or so of visibility, and we inched our way back toward the apartment.
The next day Michelle took me to Sunset Cliffs, on the tip of Point Loma past Ocean Beach.
I’d been there once, as a tourist the year before, but this time as we parked in the lot above the cliffs, Michelle said, “This is a great place to just come and think. Watch the waves. Process whatever life is throwing at you.”
We walked down through the runoff rivulets to the post and chain barrier above the cliffs, and Michelle plunked down in the dust, patting the dust with her hand and saying, “Have a seat. It’s just dirt, it’ll come off.”
I sat down and started to ask a question.
“Shhhh,” she said. “Just sit. Watch the waves.”
Now, as then, neither Michelle nor I are known for lacking in words. In fact, we both can rattle your fillings loose with chatter. But I did as I was instructed. We sat in silence.
I’m thinking maybe me being there was part of what she was processing. She’d moved to McKees Rocks early in high school and pined for San Diego the whole time she was there.
She and her mother moved back West after she graduated.
She couldn’t have imagined I’d move there before long. Or that I’d live at her place for half a year.
Me? I thought about how I could see cargo ships miles off the coast. Islands to the southwest, off Mexico. Harvesting kelp-cutting trawlers halfway to the horizon.
It seemed like I could see most of the way to Hawaii. Or Australia.
This sense was new to me.
I grew up in the valleys of Western Pennsylvania, and got stationed in Pirmasens, Germany — more hill-and-valley territory.
My horizons were always limited by the next hill.
Now, sitting above the ocean on Sunset Cliff, the only thing limiting my eyesight was, well, my eyesight.
A million possibilities seemed available from there. No shackles on where I might go or what I might try, but for the whims of fate and my capacity to take hold of opportunity.
I sat there wondering how short horizons impact people, realizing these were deeper than my normal thought, but not daring to verbalize them.
Michelle’s directives could have that type of impact.
I didn’t capitalize on what had dawned on me there as much as I could have.
I did a lot. Got a couple decent bands together, played on the Sunset Strip in L.A., spent time in Mexico — all things that took some permissive mindset to try — but before long I reshrunk my horizons with drug addiction, dwindling my circles and sometimes staying indoors for days on end despite living in the most beautiful place in the country.
Despite my bad behavior and dumb choices, I never forgot that realization that horizons can truncate thinking. Or that they can be expanded.
Eventually, Michelle turned to me and said it was time to go, and we did. We talked a bit in the car, but we were still mostly in our own thoughts.
Soon enough, I started going out to the cliffs on my own.
Eventually Michelle came to Christ, and she was instrumental in helping birth my own journey with Jesus, including getting me active in ministry by going behind my back to tell her pastor — who would become my mentor — that I’d played guitar in a couple of bands. He asked me to get involved in his struggling worship band, and I did, despite reservations.
Maybe I overcame those reservations because I’d had an epiphany about expanding horizons, or maybe I just thought so highly of her Pastor Tim that I didn’t want to decline.
Either way, it opened a thousand doors for me, changing the course of my life.
Michelle and I don’t talk often, but we remain friends, and when we do talk, we talk much.
But at one point, she showed me how to be quiet and soak it all in.
The Rev. James Hogan is a native of Stowe Township and serves as pastor of Faithbridge Community Church. His views do not reflect the views of the West Hills Gazette.
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