Sunday, August 20, 2017

Musings of a Ronin.

I remember quite distinctly my two earliest memories. The first is a confirmed account of a mere flash memory. Two frames out of an old, grainy movie film strip, of me reaching up for a bottle. The background is dark, the bottle, is the shape of a Flintstone cartoon character, and I can see both of my hands reaching for it.

The next memory, was while I was sitting on the floor of a living room in a old farmhouse near Medford, Oregon. My mother, sitting on the couch reading a newspaper, said something about karate classes. I remember being instantly focused upon her words. At this point, I have tons of life memories scattered in all directions. For purposes of this blog, I would like to take this path strictly down the martial arts memories, lesson learned, and interesting tidbits. I shall change the names to protect the not-so-innocent.

My first real martial arts memory. Once again, I am sitting on my butt, all I see is a single grainy frame. In my mind I am panning around looking at the details. I am sitting on a loft, with my back towards the railing, inches away from certain death. Watching the noobs, in the their workout clothes sitting deeply in horse stance. Later, I would learn, this was the introduction class to weed out the weak, before being thrown into the meat grinder. I recently spoke with my mother to get some approximate dates of these initial events. She said it was eight months before Chuck Norris's "A Force of One" came out. Doing some amazing math, this would have been about November of 1978. I would have just turned five years old.

Out of curiosity, I performed some Internet sleuthing. I found the school! The loft is still there, seen clearly in the background! The school looked so much bigger in my child hood mind. Talk about a serious blast from the past!
I have a few stories from this time period. Which I will save for next time.
~Mark

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