I don’t know why Jack played the cornet in band. It was a requirement that all “Effies” (7th graders) play a musical instrument for two years and be in the junior high band at Walnut Hills HS. So, three years later, I took it up. I can still play a note or two on it.
After two years I gave it up, and my mother said, “if you’re not going to play cornet, you have to find something else to learn.” I picked up a guitar that had belonged to my late father and thought, oh well, it’s the proverbial bird in the hand, so I went to Howard Early’s music studio, was assigned to the guitar instructor Bob Brock, …and that made all the difference. Still play. Still suck. Sixty years on.
Age 16 with my cousin Donald.
Three years later my Dad, an Episcopal minister at All Saint’s Church in Pleasant Ridge, decided that he needed a change. His friend, Dud Higbie, had taken over St. Paul’s in Burlingame. It had grown to the point that he needed help. He asked Dad. Dad came out for a visit. He liked what he saw. Mom and Dad came to my room one night and said, “How would you like to move to California?” I had lived in Cincinnati for all of my sixteen years and had never given a thought about moving. It took me a half hour to embrace moving to California. Leaving Cincinnati made all the difference.
After two years at Whitman College I returned to Cincinnati for my brother’s wedding. I stayed for the summer, found myself draft bait, 1-A, walked down the street from my uncle’s house, enrolled at the University of Cincinnati. Later I worked at a Kroger Warehouse from eleven at night to seven-thirty in the mornings, spent the days napping at a swim club where for inexplicable reasons an eight year old girl came over to my chaise lounge and began chatting. Why did she decide to come talk to me? Fifty-three years later, we’re still friends.
When I graduated from the University of Cincinnati in 1969 I applied to go into the Peace Corps. When I didn’t hear from them I assumed that I hadn’t been accepted, so I took a position teaching English at the American Farm School in Thessaloniki, Greece. Soon after I was accepted by the Peace Corps as part of a volunteer group called “Tonga V”. I thought about it. I chose the Peace Corps…and that made all the difference.
I enjoyed Peace Corps training so much that a volunteer who was returning from Tonga thought I was not taking it seriously enough. He blackballed me. I was fired. I had to leave the next day. I had a friend in Tonga V who spent the last night with me, commiserating, knowing how disappointed I was. A week or two later she returned. On her own. That night I asked her to marry me. And that has made all the difference.
I took this image through the window of the plane right before I left Molokai. I didn’t know then that fifty-one years later we’d be celebrating our fifty-first anniversary.
Our son Jason visited the photography retail store of the returned volunteer who kicked me out of the Peace Corps. Jason met the owner. Here is the story: http://www.davidkbuchholz.com/new-blog/2017/4/1/the-encounter
For him, his brother and sister, it, too, made all the difference.
We moved back to California, and after eight years teaching high school English I had three kids, a mortgage, and a salary of $14,400, (double what I had received eight years earlier at Talawanda HS in Oxford), so I quit teaching and tried to make a living in photography, my real passion. I did. I still love it. And that has made all the difference.
Jadyne’s sister Teeny had reserved some mountain cabins in the Rockies during a particularly snowy winter in 1988. She, her boyfriend, and several others went cross-country skiing, planning to spend the night at the cabin. She decided to go. The two of them, the better skiers in the group of friends, led the way. They, and another man, never made it. She decided to ski. She decided to lead. And that made all the difference.
The guitar, the move, the return to Cincinnati, a lifetime friend, a decision, a rejection, a career change, a decision to ski, each made a difference. The future unfolds in ways determined by what at the time may seem insignificant, minor events—the traffic light that turned red just before a runaway car hurtles through, a flight not taken. (Jennifer took a flight a day before that same flight was hijacked. She also didn’t make enough noise walking through the jungle to alert the mother tiger and her cubs. Good decision there.) There are countless other near-misses, unknown events, decisions that may have changed our lives in ways we’ll never know. No couldas, wouldas, or shouldas. We look at what is and embrace it for all that it is, give thanks, and wait for the next decision.