Today, (if
you’re reading this on the actual Express publishing day) is my 60th
birthday. Let’s pause on that thought for a moment because I’ve been trying to
figure out how I feel about this milestone. As most of you that know me or
regularly read my columns can attest, I tend to lean towards a pessimistic view
of life and getting older sure hasn’t swung the pendulum in the other
direction.
Thinking about sixty actually got me
thinking about the “Sixties” and when I started to become self-aware. If you do
the math, I was born in 1957 so I was just a pre-teen kid during the sixties.
But isn’t that the age when you start to notice the world outside your family and
to develop feelings and attitudes about life in that world.
I’ve often wondered why I see the
negative side of most things first. I think it’s because of my personal
history, especially during those formative sixties. My very first recollect
able memory is from 1961 when I was 3 ½ and it was the morning my baby sister
died. The memory is fuzzy but I can still feel my mother’s anguish. My next
major memory was 2 years later, while sitting in first grade class. An
announcement came over the P.A. that we should all stop to bow our heads and
pray because President Kennedy had just been killed. The main reason I remember
it is because of the awkwardness I felt at not knowing how to pray.
The sixties were also when TV news
becoming more graphic. I saw images of the Vietnam War from afar and of racial
suppression, murders and riots at home. There was the start of the “Cold War”,
the six day war in the Middle East, and the almost war from the Cuban missile
crisis. There was the evil of Sirhan Sirhan, Charles Manson, the Zodiac killer,
and the My Lai Massacre. All that combined with the threat of mutually assured
nuclear destruction was enough to make me want to hide under my bed for the
rest of my life.
I did poke my head out long enough to
go crazy for the Beatles, the Monkees, Star Trek, and an early fascination with
Playboy pinups. I also watched live when the first human walked on the moon (if
it wasn’t faked) so yes, the sixties weren’t all doom and gloom but still
enough to lean me towards the dark side.
Oh, did I mention that during the
sixties my father uprooted our family 3 times to follow his bliss. Not a very
stable environment for an already anxious kid but what the hell, we were just
baggage anyway.
So now we have to answer the
question, how did I survive almost 5 more decades without totally succumbing to
the darkness? I think the answer is simply “Naive Optimism” because that’s
almost always been my actions verses my thoughts. In other words, even though I
think the worst of the world and I know that we’re all going to die I still
say, “Today this will be OK” and go ahead anyway.
A few examples are: Not
going to college and instead going to the school of hard knocks by becoming a
door to door meat salesman.
·
Becoming
a forklift driver then moving into management just because someone asked me to.
·
Getting
married even though I saw my parents fail at it and I had no desire to start a
family.
·
Buying
a bagel shop with $2000 barrowed from credit cards because heigh, how hard can
it be?
·
Giving
up friends and comfort to move to California and then soon after buying a house
I couldn’t afford here in Winters.
·
Giving
up an easy, stable, and decent paying job to open a coffee house because there
wasn’t a good place in Winters to get a cappuccino and again, how hard could it
be?
·
Selling
the coffee house after the economy tanked to become executive director of the
dysfunctional chamber of commerce.
·
Last
but not least (but hopefully last) going to work for a startup winery in an
undeveloped wine region and without a sure tourism/customer draw.
To view the column in it's original form go page 12 of the following link. Winters Express 6/8/17
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