Writing last week about my Cambridge adventure reminded me of something I ran across as I was cleaning up after The Great Water-Filter Containment Failure and Basement Flood of 2006. It’s a padfolio, one of those cheap vinyl folder-thingies that you sometimes get as freebies at business functions, the ones that contain a mini-sized legal pad, a pen, and a pocket for miscellaneous papers. This particular padfolio is a souvenir of “Cinemark Customer Service University,” a corporate training session I attended during my old multiplex days. Yes, it’s true — my minimum-wage, name-badge-wearing joe-job at the movie theater required me to attend a half-day company pep-relly on how to become a better ticket-taker. As I recall, the path to usher’s nirvana basically involved more diligence in between-show lobby cleaning and never, ever questioning theater management about anything. As I further recall, this propaganda session and its breathlessly enthusiastic mantra of total obeisance to people who didn’t have as much on the ball as my pet duck was one of the final straws that convinced me it was time to start looking for a more grown-up occupation. (True story: the day I finally quit, I had to explain to my manager what I meant when I said, “I tender my resignation.” He’d never heard that expression before. And this was the guy I was supposed to bow and scrape to because he was my “superior.” Oy.)

Sour grapes aside, I’m not one to throw away free stuff, so, naturally, I used the padfolio and, naturally, I’ve still got it. And I’m sure by this point you’re all muttering under your breath, “Yes, fine, Bennion, we all know you tend to horde crap, but what has this got to do with Cambridge?” I was just getting to that…

You see, the ‘folio dates to about the same time that I would’ve been applying to the Study Abroad program that got me to England. As it turns out, a few pages still remain in the little 8″ x 5″ legal pad that came with the ‘folio, and they’re covered in miscellaneous notes, all written in official Cinemark-purple ink. Individually, these are just random and mostly mundane jottings; collectively, I think they illustrate where my head was at that point in my life in a way that my journals do not (remember, if you will, that my journals were mostly filled with pissing ‘n’ moaning about my love life — or lack thereof).
I was especially interested in a block of scribblings titled “GOALS.” It’s a two-page list of things I wanted to do and places I wanted to see — mostly the latter. I very obviously had travel on the brain back then; not surprising, since I think the ball was probably already rolling toward Cambridge when I wrote these goals down. (Actually, most of these items aren’t goals so much as “DESTINATIONS,” but hey, what did I know at the time? Most likely, this list was the result of a mid-afternoon daydreaming session in the projection booth, and the title was just an afterthought anyhow.) Reading over the list now, some thirteen years after I threw it onto the page and forgot about it, provides a glimpse of the young man I used to be and the things that used to interest me then. Some of them still interest me, some do not. I’m pleased to note that I’ve actually managed to cross off a couple of these items, but as Jimmy Buffett sings in one of my favorite songs, “there’s still so much to be done.”

Here’s the list, reproduced more or less exactly as I wrote it in my “CCSU” padfolio, with a little optional commentary added:

GOALS

1. Mesa Verde, CO
2. New Orleans
3. San Francisco [Been there.]
4. redwoods
5. Yellowstone [Done that.]
6. Yosemite
7. fly-fishing in Montana [This one came from seeing A River Runs Through It. Still love that movie, but the fishing isn’t so much of a priority anymore.]
8. drive the PCH [the Pacific Coast Highway, that is]
9. Key West — home of Jimmy [Buffett], Hemingway
10. study in England — Stratford on Avon/[T.E.] Lawrence’s tomb/Stonehenge/[Sir Richard Francis] Burton’s tomb [I did make it to Stratford and Burton’s tomb, so I guess this item could be marked “partially completed.”]
11. whale watching in Oregon or Alaska
12. cruise the Mississippi on a paddle-wheeler
13. fly in a WW II vintage plane [Done.]
14. see the Spruce Goose
15. learn to fence [A response to Highlander, no doubt. I still think it would be cool to know how to use a sword.]
16. tour Civil War battlefields, Little Big Horn
17. safari in Kenya
18. mountain gorillas in Rwanda
19. Paris
20. Australia/New Zealand
21. New Guinea [I have no idea where this one came from or why I was interested in going there…]
22. India
23. learn scuba — dive on a sunken ship
24. help out on an archeology dig [I’ve since spoken with actual archeologists who inform me that a dig is usually dirty and boring… not so much a priority anymore.]
25. learn to sail
26. ride a “tall ship“
27. Scotland — Loch Ness
28. Egypt — Cairo/pyramids/Valley of the Kings
29. Macchu Pichu, Peru
30. Smithsonian Air/Space Museum
31. Cape Canaveral — watch a shuttle launch
32. work as a roadie on a concert tour
33. listen to the Blues in a Chicago bar
34. learn the guitar
35. tour New England — read Thoreau beside Walden Pond
36. river-running
37. The Great Wall of China
38. Venice, Rome
39. Greece
40. Casablanca
41. drive Route 66
42. Hawaii
43. observe a session of Congress [This was before the Clinton impeachment and various other events that transformed Congress into a loathsome toxic-waste zone, of course.]
44. Easter Island
45. Tahiti, Jamaica [I don’t think I realized at the time that these two islands are in completely different oceans.]
46. build a black-powder rifle
47. learn to fight w/ throw a tomahawk [These last two items were no doubt inspired by the Michael Mann version of Last of the Mohicans, which I was quite enamored of in the winter of 1992. I still think they’d both be kind of cool, but the urgency has faded.]
48. tour a nuclear aircraft carrier
49. visit Jim Morrison’s grave (Paris)
50. drive an Indy car [No idea where this one came from. Possibly Days of Thunder, which we’d run at the theater a couple of years prior…]
51. drive a cigarette boat
52. go deep-sea fishing [Blame Papa Hemingway.]
53. see The Wall (Vietnam Memorial)

Hm. Looking over the list again, I’m not sure whether I should be amused or embarrassed that so many of the items were inspired by movies…