I was talking to a good friend recently about old times. Reminiscing about things that I hadn’t talked about or even thought about in years. In conjuring up these memories it felt as though I were talking about another person, another lifetime, a forgotten chapter that even myself had somehow tucked away for no good reason. Some of these events are hidden away in my mind and I don’t talk about them with anyone; not that they are all bad or anything, but because they have no reason at all to be remembered or talked about. Or maybe it’s because the people I’m around today weren’t around yesterday. I found myself thinking, almost fearing, the things I’d done and survived in my twenties. Things I’m not sure I’ll tell my kids about, till they’re much older anyway.

I was pretty wild in my twenties.

After the Navy, upon my return back home into civilian life, and after breaking up with my long time partner, I was pretty lost. I resorted to partying too much-maybe I did so to forget things I saw in middle east during the war, or forget the breakup I’d just gone through, or maybe I was making up for lost time while I was away from home. But the partying led to some bad situations. Hanging out with old friends, some of which were less than law abiding, could and did cause trouble. I grew up around gangs, and while I never delved into that life, friends and family always had a ‘side’ and this association led to some of the trouble I got into.

Most of it was plain fun good times, going out and having a blast, but some of it was bad; having guns pulled on me, being shot at. Friends murdered or shot. One close friend was paralyzed from the waist down after being shot for a wrong look to the neighboring car at a stop light. I had friends sentenced to lengthy prison terms. Eventually I ended up in jail for nearly six months for a DUI conviction, among other things like violating my probation.

These aren’t things I’m proud of.

So I don’t speak or think of them much. But they shaped me into who I am today. I get anxiety sometimes if I do think about how close I came to ruining my life at that stage. Going to jail really woke me up. It was both the worst and best thing that ever happened to me. If can split up my life into two parts, there’s before jail and after jail. During my sentencing, both my own lawyer and the prosecutor were pushing for me to get house arrest, a common sentence for my crime, but the judge wasn’t having it.

I remember the judge staring deeply into me from his high bench as he read off the sentence. How I’d hated him at that moment. It seemed so unnecessary, almost like a personal attack. Especially since the prosecutor was pushing for me to do house arrest, saying that the jails were full and they’d get money from me for paying into the service. But if I could remember the judge’s name, I would send him a thank you letter for what he did to me. He may have saved my life.

For me, jail was a place was full of people who were all smiles and jokes. Laughter filled the concrete walls of the place, but all inmates had sad stories. Almost all had rough childhoods, products of foster homes and gangs. Some had been to prison. Some murderers. Some robbers, thieves, addicts. Everyone respected one another, excusing themselves for the slightest bump or glance, a politeness I’ve never found outside of jail, but the place was like a tinder box and a fight could happen in the matter of a millisecond from a random spark. Being Mexican, I was segregated by my race, then further split up between two factions of Mexicans in jail. In California, you can’t just be a Mexican-American in jail, you have to chose a side to be with. I was on edge the entire time. The guards kept us segregated by faction, but the rule was if a rival was seen we were supposed to attack. I was lucky in that this never had to happen. But I also could never relax when my cell door was open. This was the trade off for the protection the people I ran with offered.

I fit in easy though, almost too easy. So much of jail is exactly like the Navy. The lack of privacy. The cleaning. The being told exactly what to do. The small confined spaces. The lack of communication with the outside world. The long detailed conversations about life with someone you don’t really know. Even the inmates who I hung out with had rules that I followed, rolling up our mattress during the day, mandatory working out (only time in my life I got a six pack), keeping our cells extra clean, no sleeping during the day.

What a terrible place it was. Concrete walls. Frosted windows. Heavy doors closing. Echoing sounds at night of men yelling, crying, rapping, singing. Waking at 4am to eat. 2 hours a day outside of my cell to shower, or play cards, eat store bought food or make call. 22 hours a day were spent in a tiny room with my cell mate, who in my case was charged with murdering a stranger for wearing the wrong colored hat in traffic and is doing 50 to life right now.

I found solace in reading. My mother sent me a few books and I found some gems among the wrinkled and worn stash inside the jail. It was during this time I read Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Histories by Herodotus, The Stand by Stephen King. Crime and Punishment by Dostoyevsky. I discovered Robert Silverberg. Rediscovered Grisham. I dreamed of what I would do when I got out. How I would become the best carpenter. Find the best partner. Travel as much as I could. Settle down. Never get into trouble again. Never take for granted the ability to take a walk in the sunshine whenever I pleased. Or take a shit by myself in private.

I also realized who my friends were. I had two visitors the entire time I was there and I wasn’t locked away in some far away place. I was literally down the street from most people I knew. My ‘friends’ probably drove past my new home daily.

Two visits in six months.

I would call people who I thought cared about me, but who would want to rush off the phone with me or tell me they were too busy to talk. I wrote letters to people with no response. At the time I had a bunch of friends, or people I thought were friends. Losing it all makes you realize who’s there for you. Who will spend a few minutes talking on the phone, who will drive out and see you. When I called, it was just a few random minutes in the afternoon for them, maybe they were truly busy, but to me, those few precious minutes I’d waited all day for, sometimes days, to get the chance to talk to someone. And to just be brushed off when I only wanted five minutes to say a few words with someone, well it wasn’t a pleasant feeling. I truly felt abandoned in jail.

When I got out I was homeless, kinda. I stood at a friend’s house, till finally I got the hint that I was imposing. Before I went in I had plans for my future, for what I thought would happen, but those plans changed in the minds of others while I was locked away. I had to go back home to my parents. It didn’t help the country was in a deep recession and jobs were scarce. My parents had moved away to Southern California, and so that meant I had to leave the Bay Area and abandon what I thought was my future.

I really did change my life around after this ordeal. I changed my focus from having as much fun as possible to taking work as serious as possible. No longer did I turn down overtime so I could go out. I devoted myself to learning my craft of carpentry. Reading trade books and taking home blueprints so I could read them and try to decipher the foreign language of construction. I taught myself how to make complex cuts, read framing squares, build stairs, hang doors, use the crane; I wanted to be the kind of carpenter that could do anything on the job. I wanted to be a leader on the job site. My bad time in jail fueled this drive. When I would get frustrated at work I would remind myself of how lucky I am to be given this opportunity (I don’t do this often enough anymore).

Hitting that bottom in jail was what I needed. It took my life in the right direction. I don’t speak much about my time in jail. I do know a bunch of card magic tricks that I use to impress my daughters from that time. Sometimes I’ll make a spread with top ramen, hot Cheetos, and other random snacks around the house, as an ode to another life. Other than that, this time is dead to me, or at least not spoken of.

It feels good to talk or write about things that I don’t speak much about. When I was talking with my friend I remembered how free things were for me as a mid twenty something. We talked about some good times and bad times. What struck me was how much I’d forgotten that I suddenly remembered, it was like discovering a new part of myself. There’s so much I hold inside from those times that I don’t speak of that I sometimes wonder if they really did happen. I know with my friends who I still keep in contact from those times, we all have families now and talking about those wild times around our kids just doesn’t come up.

But that wild and lost time led to a successful ‘thirties’ decade. I needed to suffer in order to grow. I see jail as sort of a ‘recession’ in my life. It led to a rebuilding with meaning behind it. A bull market of my life followed. I remember watching Obama get sworn in while I was locked up, peaking with one eye shut at a tight angle from the rectangular window in the heavy metal door to my cell, I could just glimpse the corner of the tv playing in the main room. I remember thinking to myself that things were indeed changing; the country, my life, the economy. The old administration and party that had taken me and the country to war in Iraq were being pushed aside. I couldn’t stay the same. Nothing can stay the same. The past, as immovable as it is, changes in meaning as the years march on. People who I knew, who I thought I knew, who I know now, change as I find myself anew and my perception grows.

So when I look back and reminisce, as I did with my good friend, who knew me back then through my troubles (our troubles, I should probably say), I wonder if it’s more important to look back or look forward to get where you want to go. Pretty soon, for all of us, there will be a time when there’s more looking back than forward. Today will be yesterday. Our lives are filled with chapters that we cannot see until the years give us enough runway to look back. There’s no order to any of the chapters that tell the story of my life. I don’t even think I get to decide where the chapters start and stop, not at the moment at least.

When I’m an old man ailing in my death bed, I want to look back over my life and have as few regrets as possible; for now, I don’t have a single regret over the tough times I’ve gone through or the bad decisions that led me to my rock bottom—or the part of my life I don’t speak much about these days. All of my decisions, good and bad, led to where I am today.

And so the need to make the most of now, of this moment, takes on an even greater urgency. Life is too short to deny what feels right or not say how you feel to someone. If you love someone say it. Go see someone you haven’t seen in a while. Life is short and wildly chaotic. Its too short to have regrets or hold things in. It’s also too short to cling to the past or an idea of the future we once wanted.

Time has a funny way of transforming and disfiguring our perspective. Dreams and goals change with wisdom and experience. Memories shift like sands in the wind. People change as time blunts or sharpens the edges of our personalities. Love for things and people can persist, wane, die or strengthen, like a winding river headed for the sea.

I’ve stopped trying to see the story of my life, its chapters and all, in a linear fashion of progressive growth, and instead have accepted that at any moment how I feel about the past can change and will change.

How does that old Bob Dylan song go…seems a proper way to end this post…