James Gomez:  

The photo above is a selfie taken while feeding birds and squirrels (a habit of mine) at Moody Park (6-5-2022) in the Heights of Houston, Texas. On first arriving in 1973 in this picturesque place it seemed to fit my mood, as the people were all so friendly and the park with a bayou on which it bordered, reminded me of the streams in the backwoods of McMillan Heights and mountain areas of Flagstaff Arizona where I had grown up. So I wound-up staying for many years. Although now days it's not nearly what it was. A lot has changed. Like fast flowing water under a bridge. Its gone before you know it. But I still return now and then, trying to recapture some of those first memories when everything was still pristine. Looking back, not something you can buy and certainly not like me to toss those youthful souvenirs into the bin. My 'then" pic is three years after graduation in 1970 after returning from the U.S. Army service on arriving at apartments (no longer there) across the street to this tranquil place. Much later, my wife and I bought a house a couple of miles from Moody Park, so I sometimes return to stay close to that original mood that had brought me there. It never slipped away. In retirement I have put on about 15-20 lbs. Not good, but I am working on it. And you might notice I am not in the Coconino class of 1970 photo album. But from first grade to the eleventh, I went to school in Flagstaff Arizona, beginning with Mount Elden elementary school. My teachers there were Mrs. Sufflix (first grade); Mrs. Dean (second grade); Mrs. Gibson (third grade); Mrs. Evans (fourth grade); and Mrs. Benson (fifth grade) and Mr. Myers (sixth grade) before moving on to junior high school and then high school where each class had a different instructor. But it was in Mr. Myers class that I remember one day he was called outside into the hallway by someone in tears. When he came back in, he asked our class to take a moment of silence - he informed us that JFK, our U.S. President, had just been assassinated. It came as horrible shock to everyone. Much later, after a half semester into my tenth to eleventh grade, our family began the move to the Rio Grande Valley in South Texas where a majority of our relatives lived. Its where the people said "you'll" and I tried to get along with it all. So I wound up graduating there in Edinburg, Texas changing the shape I was in and got moving again. The adjustment wasn't easy, since they valued my academic skills more than I was accustomed and didn't know what to make of it all. I was not used to thinking of myself as academically "sharp" like they thought of me there in Edinburg. For whatever reason, in Flagstaff my near straight "A" average was never noticed by anyone. So, this was something new I was discovering about myself in this new setting. It was like starting all over again. Being told I was a straight "A" student in some courses but failing in some advanced courses was also something new. I was not used to studying, so it didn't come as a complete surprise. At the time, naïve as I was, everything seemed to be about memory recall about what was seen, heard and read. This had been my Flagstaff learning. So, I was soon out of my depth in some courses in Edinburg that required previous in-depth knowledge of various kinds that I had never been exposed to and didn't know anything about. It was like getting up in the morning and waking up to where I never had been. For me, there was also something unusual of trying to keep things in your head (=memorizing) that I had never attempted. Prior to that, everything was a flow. Either something stayed or it didn't. It was always free to drop off. So, I went with what stuck in memory and what it pointed to, as I moved forward. It seemed natural, even when it seemed to contradict common sense in some contexts. As far as I can tell, nowadays most persons follow other ways, depending on overriding influences. So I hope you don't mind that I consider myself to be a part of both schools of Flagstaff-Edinburg/class of 1970. I have fond memories of both places. My sometimes failings in sports and in the classroom didn't seem to faze me at the time. It might be because I had such great teachers that always encouraged and urged me forward towards success. I will always be thankful for that. After high school, I went to serve three years in the U.S. Army as a medic. And because of my high scores, intellectual and physical, they wanted to make me a Green Beret medic (=first choice) or a Warren Officer flying helicopter missions in Vietnam (=second choice), but my eyesight was not correctible to 20-20. They kept trying for several weeks to get me to 20-20 and I wanted the same thing, squinting hard to get it right. But it was not to be. I later realized I might have gotten killed over there in Vietnam - how lucky can one man get! After that, I did an 18 month tour in Okinawa and a 12 month tour in South Korea as an ordinary field medic. There I saw many broken Vietnam soldiers come through our field clinics and did my utmost to help where I could. My involvement in sports and a decent academic record at Coconino and Edinburg High showed signs of paying off, though I was still very green, greener than a hill. After serving in the U.S. Army, our family permanently moved to South Texas and I went to Houston to explore big city life and better opportunities. I had thought about becoming a policeman or firefighter but an eyesight correctible to 20-20 was also required. So I hung those options from my rearview mirror. After that, I went to college and got a degree in sociology at the University of Houston and also worked as an Emergency Room Technician (ERT) for about five years before completing my bachelors degree (actually it was more complicated than that). I realized, after several years, that my position as an ERT was just a continuation of the battlefield related memories I had just left. I was witness to many more terrible things happening everywhere. It was difficult to take its measure and was a shock in those days for someone trying to come into their own in the center of a large modern American city. The whole thing appeared like a complicated mental maze of some kind that I couldn't fathom at the time. But it also might have been my past sneaking up on me. There are things I can't forget. Fortunately, I had managed to pick up a few programming courses along the way that qualified me as a computer programmer/coder. But in the beginning I started out as a computer operator. It helped me to become focused to just one thing. So for the next 15-20 years - don't know how/why that happened, except that something about "analysis" seemed to come natural and so I went to work in the field of IT (Information Technology). I immersed myself into it, seeking out its various logics and its relational byways. It was an endless, mostly abstract endeavor aimed at averting software crashes and making the computer programs more efficient that were not always successful. Then I fell in love while ...Expand for more