It’s the New Year
and the old year has passed.
Trump. That said,
I’ll go on.
I’ve always been
obsessed with numbers, counting, comparing, ratios and the passage of
time, in a day, in a week, over the span of my life. It could be my
generation or just me, but I’m amazed to find myself old and
whatever one says or thinks, dices it or explains it, 71 years old is
old. I was born in 1946 and while I wasn’t there for World War II,
I do remember the Red Cars in Los Angeles and when NBC was at Sunset
and Vine.
So Two Thousand and
Eighteen is well into the 21st century and I am rooted in
the 20th century. I’ve been listening to people younger
than I am talk about a neighborhood, Highland Park, York Avenue in
Los Angeles when it used to be rougher, more dangerous back in the
mid-90’s. Mid-90’s I think. Yeah, it has changed a lot since
then, but I left York Avenue in the 80’s. I first lived there in
the 70’s.
I often think of my
grandmother who was born and aware before there were automobiles. I went to work when computers occupied floors of sprawling new data
centers. And like the automobile in the 1920’s the computer today
is just at the beginning of the changes it will work. An information
technology manager for a small bank I worked at, bragged in 1992 that
we were set for the future with a central computer that had, can you
believe it, 3 gigabytes of storage. I am writing this on a laptop
computer with hundreds of gigabytes of storage.
I’m more aware
that now death is getting closer. One of my three sisters passed
away last year at the age of 74. My best friend from high school and
my best friend from college have passed on, one young at 45 and the
other died of a heart attack the same year I had a heart attack at
the age of 63. That was eight years ago. Anyone who is living eight
years after a heart attack is doing well.
I remember years
ago when I stopped by the Village Bakery in Glendale. The owner
behind the counter wondered why I was looking at it so hard. Oh I
told her, I used to work here . . . 20 years ago.
Twenty years in
which I had graduated from high school, become a monk, gone to
college, served in the Air Force, lived in England, graduated from
college, worked for Bank of America, left Bank of America, then
UARCO, and then City National Bank. Years in which I got married,
three sons were born, I bought two different houses, I got divorced,
I got sober and stopped by to visit a bakery that I had once worked
in.
I’m thinking in 20
year increments. I’m better than half way through my fourth
increment.
And so this young
man, a father with a wife and two children, wanted to talk about York
Avenue in the old days, but he didn’t mean 42 years ago when I
first went there, but 20 years ago when I had already moved to the
Bay Area.
Twenty year
increments. I was born in the mid-40’s, the first to 1966, the second to 1986, 60 years old in 2006 and now more than half way to 2026, in my fourth score of years, a third marriage, an eight year old daughter, retirement
and remembering York Avenue in the 80’s, some 37 years ago.
Time streteches,
twists, shrinks, and expands, it is unpredictable, a short time, a
long time, when I was young, when my children were young, when my
grandchildren were babies. Two of my granddaughters, both 18, took my
daughter, 8, on a shopping trip and bought her very stylish and
trendy clothes, she looks like one of her nieces.
I have a friend who
this year turns 80 and begins his 5th score of years and
I’m not far behind, the 20 year increment where we dodder, lose
touch and probably die, that is if I make it through my fourth score
of years.
And once there was
someone who remembered the Congress of Vienna as a new beginning and
so it was.
