Tupa View: All roads lead to a Dream (part 1 of 3)
By Mike Tupa
Bartlesville Area Sports Report
(NOTE: This is the first of a three-part column.)
Sometimes I look back at my life’s journey and wonder: How in the world did I get to where I got?
It’s been an odd odyssey, a patchwork jumble of inconsistencies that fate has pieced together in some kind of nonsensical quilt pattern that somehow makes perfect sense.
On my 40th birthday I began the cross-country trip to Bartlesville to begin my newest adventure.
During my first 40 years I had moved 30-or-more times, resided for prolonged periods in seven different states (California, Nevada, Utah, Texas, Tennessee, South Carolina and Hawaii), two foreign nations (Italy and Japan) and made overnight-or-longer stops in at least another four states and another foreign nation (Mexico).
There’s one advantage to such a life’s course — one becomes an expert at saying good-bye. Good-bye to friends one would never see again, good-bye to the only treehouse you ever knew, good-bye to the old apple tree in which you spent many hours feeling the breeze and daydreaming, good-bye to good schools and good teachers or bad schools and bad teachers, good-bye to that old gulley in Eureka, Calif. in which you and other neighborhood kids used to slide down the sides on cardboard boxes and good-bye to household pets left to their eternal rest in spoon-shoveled graves under the clothes line or elsewhere in the backyard.
I have no childhood home to which to return or not one friend from childhood years to reminisce with about old times. Many of my former houses or apartments have been torn or burned down, standing only in memory.
Even pretty much all the friends I made during teenage and young adult years and I have drifted away to different destinies of life in which we no longer are part of each other’s reality.
Out of the complexities of my first four decades emerged some wonderful simplicities — the true meaning of family, the ever-present love of God that transcends circumstance or geography, the importance of an internal moral compass regardless of environment and the belief most people are decent and kind and that there is good in everyone.
Following are some of the twists and turns that have defined my meandering trek on this globe.
POTATO SALAD MAKER: At age 18 I secured my first full-time job by cooking 500-pound batches of potato salad mix or coleslaw mix 10-or-more times a week for Lynn Wilson’s Foods in Salt Lake City. I succeeded in this endeavor — which required dumping 100 pound bags of ingredients above my shoulders into a huge cooking vat — for more than six months prior to leaving for my church mission to Italy. In fact when I began college a few years later Lynn Wilson’s hired me again as a mixer — as they called it — for a summer job. At the end of this stint, Mr. Wilson himself tried to persuade me to stay full-time. Prior to this job, I had had to drive a bicycle nine miles one way — through some heavy traffic — for my part-time job for Sears at a Salt Lake City mall.
JUST THE FACTS: For more than two-and-a-half years in my young teenage years I delivered the Ogden Standard-Examiner, seven days a week, no holidays. One of my customers was Sister Davis, a former schoolteacher and wonderful woman, who happened to be one of grandmothers of the singing Osmond siblings, who hadn’t yet reached their peak popularity. Every month when I went to her house to collect my bill, she would diplomatically “nag” me about writing left-handed and even offered to give me writing exercises to learn to use my right hand. She said someday I might lose my left hand, but I really thought she was a product of her time that believed there was something wrong with being left-handed. I also recall being twice “treed” by loose dogs. Well, actually one of those times I was “carred,” when I scrambled on top of someone's vehicle — in the pitch dark about 6 a.m. on a Sunday morning — to get away from a mean-looking big dog.
(NOTE: The next part is planned in the next few days.)
Mike Tupa during his high school years.