At the Half Century Mark An Ode to . . . Me!

Me (the one without fur)

It's my day tomorrow. If I could will it, all men and women on this planet would stop and consider me for just a moment.  The earth has sped around the sun fifty times since Mom bore me in a little room at St. Mary's Hospital at the north end of Genesee Street in Rochester, New York on a very hot July 23rd in the year of our Lord one thousand nine hundred and sixty two.  Therefore, on this personally elevated anniversary, for one brief instant, I should be the center of attention.  But, not having the power to influence many outside my social circle, 6,999,999,800 or so people on this blue marble have no idea who I am and won't care.  So, for the remaining few who do know me and might care, I write these words.

When I wriggled and wailed on a steel table with a partial umbilical cord still attached at my belly button, Jack Kennedy had a bit more than a year left to serve as president before Lee Harvey Oswald changed history by killing him.  Like millions then too, Jack Kennedy didn't know me and I returned the favor by not knowing him.  Solely because we lived at the same time, though, we are inextricably bound. Incidentally, speaking of John Kennedy, I wish Marilyn Monroe were around to sing Happy Birthday to me today.  If fact, she could sing any darn song she pleased.  The glare on Jackie Kennedy's face on that historical night is too precious for words.  Even on sultry Washington, DC summer nights things stayed cool at the White House I'll bet.

Just a few months later, still wrapped in swaddling clothes and needing the assistance of others to clean me up after pooping, I, a strapping infant, managed like the rest of America not to get nuked by the Soviet missiles of October.  President Kennedy called Kruschev's bluff near Cuba and the world survived and so did I.  But, I don't have even the faintest personal recollection of ships and blockades and the roar of jets and only later learned of all of it but was still relieved I didn't die in a nuclear sunburst.  At elementary school, we still did nuclear duck and cover drills.   The air raid siren would sound and we would get under our desks or against the walls in the hallways.   None of that would have mattered if a Soviet ICBM exploded over Rochester, though, but it was nice to feel like you were doing something.  Now, if you talk to someone in his teens, he will have never heard of the Soviet Union and certainly won't know what a duck and cover drill was.

Back in the 1960s, whooping cough, polio and even smallpox still killed or maimed with alarming frequency and so too did cigarettes and booze.  Both were freely advertised on every media outlet available.   I never smoked but I always knew that Winstons tasted good like a cigarette should.   I also knew that it took three licks to get to the center of a tootsie roll center of a tootsie pop because that's what the wise old owl told me on TV.  Our first TV was black and white and big and filled with tubes and got real hot after watching it a while.  We had to get up from the bean bag and turn the dial to change the channel from Ms. Rita's Romper Room to Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom and the Wonderful World of Disney.  The Wizard of Oz came on TV once a year and everybody watched it.  Now you can operate your TV from your phone which, by the way, is a TV too.  It also has far more computer power than all the computers that were used to put a man on the moon.   I remember that day, by the way.  I was seven and space travel was cool and Neil Armstrong was, and still is, one of my all time heroes.  Despite that, I don't quite understand what he meant when he stepped on the moon and said, "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind."  Isn't that redundant? Shouldn't it have been, "one small step for A man?"   Anyway, he probably had a lot on his mind being the first to walk on an extraterrestrial surface and all.  He gets a pass for a minor grammatical flub.

My first year was spent at Grandma and Grampa's house on Aldine Street in the 19th Ward in Rochester, just a hop and a skip from my birthplace.   Then the street was mostly white and middle class and people shopped and ate in the city.  A few years later, the city burned on another hot July weekend.  The 1964 Rochester race riots marked the beginning of a mass exodus of people from the Flower City and it has never recovered.  But, prior to that, Eastview Mall was years away from being just around the corner.  Midtown Plaza still smelled of fresh paint and was already considered the 8th human wonder of the world.   I spent countless hours there.  I also found myself frequently across the street at Sibley's until time and demographics shifted populations and tastes and both closed and were no more.

We, like so many others in post-World War II America, saw the allure of suburban living with larger homes, separated by big, grassy yards and two car garages.  The houses were filled with stuff that an industrious workforce could provide itself as it worked from 9 to 5 in America's factories, shops and farm fields.   Our little slice of heaven was on Parkview Drive in Penfield and there, along with a brother and three sisters, a couple of cats, a bird and the occasional hamster or goldfish, we lived the perfect life of kids.  Surrounded by the marshy estuary of Irondequoit Creek as it dumps into the bay and great Lake Ontario beyond, summer hours were spent fishing and wandering and chasing butterflies and swimming and countless other easy means to pass the time with, believe it or not, ninety or so other kids who populated the neighborhood. Needless to say, most of the families were Catholic, most Moms stayed home and, generally, did not work.  It was barely controlled chaos.  People fully understood then why parents smoked and drank.

My teenage years were just as pleasurable.  School was easy and I made lots of friends with whom I still keep in touch.  I worked and made money by cutting lawns and delivering newspapers and other odd jobs that kept me in the money.  That spirit and measured effort brought me a scholarship to the University of Rochester.  That place was not a cheap place to go to school even in 1980.  Mom and Dad were more than happy that I footed the bill or, rather, that Uncle Sam footed the bill.  The money came from the US Navy and because of it, I owed them four years of service as an officer.  I chose the Marines rather than a life on ships and, instead of the required four years, spent nine serving my country in peace and in war.  I traveled the world and spent time in places good and bad and saw both good and bad in people and in things.   The Marines taught me loyalty, pride, leadership, love of comrades.  They also taught me to work real hard and play even harder.

In 1993, I became a civilian once again and lolled around a bit.  My "finding myself" moment did not come as a teen or a college graduate but rather as a 31 year old veteran of the Marines with a history degree and who knew how to shoot artillery.  There wasn't much demand for that in the civilian work force so I went back to manual labor and odd jobs to pay the bills.  I also volunteered to fight fires and learned how tough it is to put on turn out gear and drag a hydrant filled three inch hose into a smoke filled house at night.

Landscaping and puttering around were only a temporary plan and graduate school was next. What was it to be.  Law?  Business?  What?  Rochester offered a degree in Public Policy which, looking back, was a really smart play.  Not so much for what it taught but rather for the connections and the fact that it was there I met my future wife.  She was wearing a pair of Looney Tunes sneakers and I really liked Bugs Bunny so I asked her out.  The rest, shall we say, is history.

Timing is everything and I came back on the work force with a Masters degree just as the Telecommunications Act of 1996 had turned one year old.  The market for telecommunications exploded and the demand for labor in the field exceeded supply.  I fell into government relations and regulatory affairs and migrated from a consulting firm to a small competitive long distance and local carrier to what was eventually to become one of the largest competitive telecommunications providers in the U.S.  In the meantime, I proposed to Jill, got married, had a kid named John William (Jack) and bought a couple of houses in Pittsford, New York which is one of the nicest places I have ever lived and I have lived all over this great land so I ought to know.  We joke that Pittsford is like the town in the movie Pleasantville because everything is almost too nice to be real.  But, it's real.  

I am naturally curious and get easily bored and so I left an executive position at my company and, having made a little money, decided to take some time off.   During that time, I read a ton of books, spent a whole bunch of time with my family, wrote and published a book, started a weblog, traveled and started a consulting business.  The "time off" has allowed me to get back into the physical shape in which I like to be. It has also been a boon for me getting used to two new titanium hips.   My family's medical history is dotted with osteoarthritis.  We all carry genes and those genes mutate in good ways and in bad.   My family carries mutations that lead to bad hips.  Having run and hiked countless miles on them in the first 45 years of life, my hip joints wore down to bone on bone.  Ouch!  A really good orthopedic surgeon here in Rochester fixed me right up though and now I can bike and hike forever.  We live in an age of miracle medicine.  At fifty, I feel pretty good about the prospects of living another half century and maybe more.  If I don't, my hips could.  Some being, long in the future, may uncover my sarcophagus and will find what was once me mostly dust.   But, my hips will be as shiny and radiant as they were the day they were installed.  I, in one way or another, will last a lot longer than most!

In my life, I have sailed the southern ocean and the Bering Sea, climbed mountains and hiked in the desert.  I have dived under the waters of fresh lakes and salty seas.  I've been catapulted off an aircraft carrier in a jet and been hundreds of feet below the waves in a nuclear submarine.  I've stood inches from and touched nuclear weapons powerful enough to eradicate life on earth.  I've seen flying fish dance over the water in the mid-Pacific and seen thousands of dolphins play in the wake of a ship. I've crossed the equator several times and seen the Southern Cross.  I've seen the sun in the northern sky because that's where it is when you are on the bottom half of the earth.  I've flown over, walked on, drove on and sailed under the Golden Gate Bridge.  I've flown an open cockpit bi-plane and pulled six G's.  I've been to North Korea and don't want to go back.  I've been to both the bottom and the top of the Grand Canyon and to 46 states in our wonderful Union.  One of the prettiest beaches I have ever seen was in Ogalalla, Nebraska believe it or not.  I've been in a couple of large earthquakes including the largest in southern California in several decades (Landers, CA, June 1992).  I've seen a tornado close up - too close and felt the wrath of a hurricane.  I have fought for my country in war and served her in peacetime.  I have been shot at by both friend and foe alike.  The friends shoot a lot better and more accurately let me be the first to report!

I have loved much and hated very little and, if asked if I could do it again what would I change?  Not a thing.

I wish myself many happy returns of the day.  Cheers!  Here's to the next half century!