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Hey kid,
This is you 54 years later. I know, I know, you're confused. So just sit back and listen.
1953. This is going to be a kind of a rough year for you. Your mother hasn't been feeling well for months . . bad headaches. About a month before school is going to start for you, you hear you're going on a trip to Minnesota with your granddad and his sister, who's been visiting your family in North Dakota. This sounds like a great idea to you. But. You're lying on the living room couch in your aunt's house in Minnesota when the phone rings and she answers it. Somehow you know from the tone of her voice that your mother has died. Brain tumor. She never made it to surgery because it was too far advanced by the time it was discovered.
For awhile, your Dad will consider sending you to a boarding school in Utah but will change his mind and instead hire a housekeeper and keep you home.
A couple of years later after having discovered electricity and then short wave radio, you will pass a test and become a ham radio operator. That will help assuage some of the grief you suffer when your team, the Brooklyn Dodgers, are moved across country to Los Angeles.
Elvis Presley breaks on the horizon around 1956 and you'll get pretty good at mimicking his voice. But your favorite will be Jerry Lee Lewis singing "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On." Have to pick that up on some faraway station because the stations close to where you live haven't made the switch yet.
James Dean is big in the movies and you will acquire a red nylon jacket like his and wear it around town with the collar turned up. You'll also be influenced enough by him to act in a couple of plays in high school and more when you go to college. Speaking of college, you're about to make some big mistakes. The first one will be majoring in Physics, thinking you want to be an electrical engineer. That will only last one semester as you realize you have no ability to handle abstract concepts. Mistake #2: you switch your major to Math and do pretty good until you get stuck in Advanced Calculus. Finally, you will make a correct decision and become an English Major. But with only about a year left to a degree, you'll leave college and never get back.
But you will have a career. Having begun work as a radio announcer as a part-time job, you get hired at a station in another town. Then on to another town and another job and several more in radio and television for the next 25 years.
Wait up a second. You're going to meet a very pretty lady who stops by that first radio station one night to see what the "crazy guy on the radio" looks like. It was lust at first sight and soon you are married. She has a son, who you adopt, and you soon have one of your own to add to the mix. A few years later, all of that ends in divorce.
Having spent 10 years working in North and South Dakota, you finally apply for a job at a radio station in Indianapolis and, to your great surprise, are hired. You will spend three years there and meet your second and final wife, the legendary SWMBO - for She Who Must Be Obeyed.
You will marry her when you are 31 and take on her three teenagers! The whole family will move to Arizona in a couple of years and that will become your home for most of the rest of your life.
Except . . . for a period from 1987 to 1993. First you move to Mexico for about 4-1/2 years. You will be younger than most of the Americans and Canadians you will meet there so you will make up an answer for their questions along the lines of "What are you doing here?" The answer: "Conducting in depth research into the effects of tequila on the modern American male." There will be a considerable amount of that type of research although Mexican brandy and water becomes your drink of choice.
You will meet some good new friends in Mexico. Your best friend there will turn out to be the father of Cynthia Nixon, the New York actress who played Miranda in "Sex and the City." Another will be a woman who moves back to Seattle, divorces and re-marries. But she will remain a good friend, even if she will support the Seattle Mariners and Seahawks. Another will be a woman who spent half a lifetime as a Roman Catholic nun before leaving the order. You will nickname her The Fleeing Nun and have many good discussions of religion with her. Her husband will die after they return to the States and she will re-marry.
After 4-1/2 years in Mexico, you'll decide to return to the U.S. and will land in Austin, Texas for a couple of years before the humidity will drive you back to Arizona.
You will open a bookstore in 1996 and keep it going until 2003. Too much competition from a growing number of retail stores selling at wholesale prices.
At that time you'll be a couple of years short of Social Security so you'll go back to working for a radio station, doing news and covering city hall and the Superior Courts. You'll develop an affection for lawyers, both prosecutors and defense attorneys, as well as several judges.
You'll finally retire in 2006. Now this may sound kind of boring but I've skipped over a lot of great and some not so great times in these 54 years. As I always tell people, just keep smilin'.
....Your older self
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