Septuagenarian Reflections

Every seventy years or so, I feel that it is necessary to reflect on the many years gone by.  You can wait until you are eighty, with more experience, but I already find my memories to be a bit fragile.  Therefore, as a septuagenarian, I thought I would take keyboard and mouse in hands to jot down a few thoughts.  It also lets me use the word septuagenarian in a sentence.

I'm a card-carrying member of the human race (actually, you don’t need a card but it sure sounds more official).  Being a member of the human race is no great accomplishment.  Most bi-pedal animals without prehensile tails would fall into this category.  Even some animals that slither on the ground identify with humanoids.  You probably refer to them as politicians, personal injury lawyers, and blonde billionaires.

Personal Injury Lawyer (almost human)

We have many races.  Foot races, car races, political races, rat races, sack races, obstacle races, boat races, bike races, and let’s not forget Aesop and his famous tortoise and hare race.  As races go, the human race is one everyone wants to join but nobody wants to win.  Crossing the finish line before everyone else is probably not a good thing.  You want this to be a marathon not a sprint.  Perhaps that’s why we tend to slow down a bit near the end.  My 4.4 second 40 is now more like a 44 second 4.  I actually doubt that I ever ran a 4.4 sec. 40 but, since high school was over 50 years ago, who’s around to question?  Hourglasses and sundials weren’t that accurate anyway.

Tortoise and Hare Race

I’m writing this in January of 2017, and we just completed a hectic year.  I guess I was inspired partially by the many televised memorials to those who dropped out of the race in the past 12 months.  The memorials covered individuals who, for one reason or another, were either famous or infamous.  Debbie Reynolds and Fidel Castro come to mind.  It seems you can be on either extreme of this spectrum to get an end of year memorial mention.  However, folks in the middle get…, bupkus.  So, let’s have a moment of silence here, for the “folks in the middle.”  Moment’s over.  I’m sure many of these not-so-famous people led more productive lives than many who made the list.

Debbie Reynolds and Fidel what's-his-name

Well, enough of this depressing talk and on to more light-hearted stuff.  How about climate change?  This can be lighthearted since almost half of our population doesn’t believe it exists. Meanwhile, people in south Florida are stockpiling sandbags, polar bears are shopping for lifeboats on Amazon, and woolly mammoths are waking up and looking for their next meal.  Just kidding about that last one and polar bears can’t buy lifeboats until their Coke residual checks clear the bank.  I don’t personally have to worry about climate change.  Did I mention that I'm over 70?  Hell, I can probably get by with some good waders.  With water up to my waist, I’ll never need Depends.  Just stay upstream and you'll be OK.  You see, there’s always a bright side.

Got a Lifeboat for Sale?

 

But, enough of the recent past and predictions of a bleak future.  How about a real look back?  To a time when I rolled my little red wagon down 120^th street in Biscayne Park with my “I Like Ike” sticker on the side.   

I Didn't Really Know Why I Liked Ike

It was a time when neighbors had bar-b-ques with plenty of food, beer, and sodas.  The whole block showed up.  As a kid, I had my hot dog, potato chips, and baked beans on a paper plate.  I had my soda in a can and managed the occasional stolen sip of somebody’s misplaced beer.  The adults did adult stuff and the kids played in the street.  Then somebody messed the whole thing up and invented the television set.

Ozzie, Harriet, David, and Ricky watching Ozzie, Harriet, David, and Ricky

That’s when society changed.  Families gathered around the TV set and ate TV dinners on the aluminum plates upon which the night’s meal was cooked.  Ozzie loved Harriet, David and Ricky got into mischief, and Thorny was always there for a laugh.  Before TV, we were the Nelsons and now we watched the Nelsons. 

 

The 50’s gave way to the 60’s.  It was a time (50's & 60's) for Butch and Sundance, Psycho, The Hustler, Bullitt, Goldfinger, The Odd Couple, and The Graduate.  We listened to Sugar Shack, Honky Tonk Women, Big Bad John, and Big Girls certainly Didn’t Cry.  We were winning the righteous war in Viet Nam.  Righteous here is a relative term and was most relevant with defense contractors.  Ike signed the Civil Rights Act (1957) and The Beatles began as a group.  It was a time of The Flintstones, Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In, the Berlin Wall was built, Barbie and Ken were now officially a couple, JFK was elected and assassinated, the first Ford Mustang was built, the Medicare bill passed, and The Doors defied the censors and sang the word “higher” in their song Light My Fire on Ed Sullivan.  And, we can’t forget that Neil Armstrong took his "one small step for man."  We ended the turbulent 60’s with Woodstock bringing peace and love to New York and the Charles Manson family bringing terror to California.

The 1970’s had disco.  Nothing else of any significance happened in the 70’s, just disco.  Donna Summer, the Bee Gees, and KC and the Sunshine Band ruled the decade.  Put on your bell-bottom pants, platform shoes, polyester shirt, and head to the disco.  I say nothing else happened but a few minor events are of note:  Jimmy Hoffa got lost and never found his way home; Elvis ate his last peanut butter, banana and bacon sandwich;  America lost its righteous war in Viet Nam; an Apple was no longer just a piece of fruit; Microsoft was selling Basic interpreters for the Altair 8800; your new lava lamp could keep you entertained for hours; and the Three Mile Island Nuclear Power Plant became a glowing example of how Murphy's Law applies to science.

Bee Gees

While the 60’s and 70’s were the most formative for me, the 1980’s would lay claim to perhaps the most earth shattering development of the twentieth century.  No, the hula-hoop was invented in the 50’s, please guess again.  Well, for a kid that grew up learning the Dewey Decimal System so he could find a book in the North Miami Library, ARPANET was to be my new best friend.  While technically founded in the 60’s and 70’s, it wasn’t until the 1980’s when it reached the east coast of the US.  I had recently hired two part time students from Florida International University.  They showed me how to use a dial up modem to go through the university and reach other universities around the world.  ARPANET was the foundation of what we now refer to as the Internet and my early command line code access gave way to Prodigy and its graphical interface.  I demonstrated my personal copy of Prodigy to my boss at the computer department who exclaimed, “You know, this Internet might just turn out to be something.”  The understatement of the decade.

Prodigy Graphical Interface

I sent my first email on a mainframe computer in something called DISOSS, mispronounced "dyed-socks" by my Cuban-American boss.  This was a doomed IBM product that required half a dozen steps to delete each email.  These important missives were from various co-workers and generally concerned some cat they were giving away or a lost and found item.  Later in life, there was CompuServe and AOL.  The latter was famous for, “You’ve got mail.”  Life in the time of dial-up modems was fun but if I never hear that modem connection sound again, it will be too soon.

Blazing 1200 baud Modem

Technological advances in my lifetime have been mind-boggling.  The kid who used to stare at a console radio while listening to The Lone Ranger and Hopalong Cassidy now watches movies and shows on a large curved screen 4K television.  My portable AM radio could play Jimmy Gilmer’s Sugar Shack in 1963 if I had the dial tuned to WQAM at the right time.  Now I just say, “Alexa, play Sugar Shack.”  Yes, technology changes but my taste in music still favors the past.  I used to know how to fold a road map but now I know how to say, “Voice Command, Go Home.”  My GPS then uses multiple satellites in space to find where I am and tells me how to find my house.  You wouldn’t think I could misplace my house in Miami but every trip home from the airport has me traveling a new route.  You have to love road construction and detours in The Magic City.

Voice Command, Go Home

I am a photographer who started life with 120 paper backed film loaded in the family Brownie.  I still remember turning the dial until a series of arrows behind the red circle window told me to slow down as the number one was about to appear for my first of twelve shots.  I now pop two 120GB flash chips into my digital camera and I'm ready to take thousands of images and/or shoot some high definition video.  

Brownie Camera

We also had a spring loaded movie camera that shot 8mm film.  The film was loaded into the camera, you wound the spring several turns, and you could shoot about 3 minutes of people waving at the camera in discomfort.  You then flipped the film reel over and shot another 3 minutes of people who are now really getting annoyed.  Once the film was developed you loaded the film on a projector, aimed the projector a white portable screen, and voilà, you saw annoyed people waving back at you.  Now I load my digital chip contents into my computer, transfer the video to my entertainment center’s NAS (network access storage) drive and play the video or slideshow of stills on a flat panel display.  We are now watching images of uncomfortable people in the 21^st century waving at us in high definition.  That's progress.

8MM Movie Camera

Everybody had a telephone during my lifetime.  It was wired to a wall and if you wanted to move around you got a longer cord.  Phone numbers were seven digits long and long distance calls required an operator's assistance.  The phone numbers in Florida had exchanges which preceded the other five digits and had names like PLaza, FRanklin, and JEfferson.

Dial Phone

Eventually in 1973, mobile phones were invented.  They weighed in around 4 and a half pounds with battery and antennae.  These phones could make phone calls.  That was it.  You could call a number and talk to someone.  Phones wouldn't get smart for quite a while.  People wouldn't get smart until much later.  Some folks never made it.  They voted for.....(never-mind, we won't go there).

Man With 1973 Mobile Phone in Hand

The initial goal for mobile/cell phone design was to make them smaller.  If you had a smaller phone than someone, you were automatically cooler than that person.  Later, when screens were incorporated with advanced features, phone size went in the other direction.  Bigger was now better.  You have to love technology.

Phones Get Smaller

I’ve had many jobs over the years.  I flipped burgers at Royal Castle, delivered the Miami News on my bike, stocked shelves at Winn Dixie, sold soft drinks in the Orange Bowl, worked on a survey crew for the State Road Department, parked cars at the Boca Raton Hotel and Club, worked as a storekeeper in the Navy, did employment counseling in the Veteran’s Administration, and worked as a sales relations representative for the Chevrolet Motor Division of GM.  I spent my final 30+ years working for Miami-Dade County at their Drug and Alcohol programs, Housing and Urban Development, Parks Department, and finally the Computer Department that had more names than I care to remember.  I look back at this list and it’s no wonder I’m tired.

Royal Castle, Home of the 15 cent burger and 5 cent birch beer

After all that work comes Retirement, with a capital R.  A time to kick back and relax.  Not really, as any homeowner can attest.  To quote Roseanne Roseannadanna,  “…it's always something — if it ain't one thing, it's another."  The secret to retirement, have a hobby or two that you really enjoy.  I enjoy photography, travel, woodworking, computers, and basically anything technical.  I’ve set up my Protopage homepage with active links to PC World, Engadget, New York Times-Tech, CNN, CBS, Fox, MSNBC, Wired, National Geographic, TechCrunch, Rolling Stone, The Onion, and BBC News.  At the bottom of my homepage, I have my daily Dilbert comic strip.  I subscribe to and read The Miami Herald, Wired, Photoshop User, Popular Photography, Outdoor Photography, and Vanity Fair.  I rarely read a book but might manage one or two during the year.

My Protopage Home Screen

That’s a look at the past.  Let’s see what the future brings.  We can all hope our nation’s leaders will stop what they’ve been doing up to now and start doing what’s right.  The pessimist in me doesn’t think that’s possible.  The optimist in me says, even the Cubs finally won a pennant.  They won their last pennant two weeks after I was born and that was a long time ago.  Hell, the Cubs even went on to win the World Series this past year.

The Cubs Did It, Now it is up to our Politicians, Win Damn It

I’ll leave you with a few quotes I stole from the Internet:

• ·        “If you want to leave footprints in the sands of time, don’t drag your feet.”

• ·        “The harder you fall, the higher you bounce.”  Followed quickly by, “If at first you don’t succeed, skydiving is not for you.”

• ·        “Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day.  Teach him how to fish, and he will sit in a boat and drink beer all day.”

• ·        “The difference between erotic and kinky is that one uses a feather, the other uses the whole chicken.”

• ·        “Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the universe.” —Albert Einstein

• ·        “My choices in life were either to be a piano player in a whore house or a politician.  And to tell the truth, there’s hardly any difference!” —Harry Truman

• ·        “Years ago, my momma taught me that two wrongs don’t make a right - but I soon figured out that three left turns do.” —Jim Hightower

And finally,

• ·        “Friends are like knickers.  Some crawl up your ass, some snap under pressure, some don't have the strength to hold you up, some get a little twisted, some are your favorite, some you can see right thru, some are cheap and just plain nasty, and some actually cover your ass when you need them to.  Some you just hang out to dry.