But the sad fact is that I have arrived. It was 69 years ago this morning – shortly after midnight on March 21, 1951 – when the wanton cries of a bouncing baby boy echoed through the maternity ward of Holy Cross Hospital, on the southwestern fringe of Chicago, Illinois. It was a Wednesday, the first day of Spring that year. My folks brought me home to our South Side apartment on Easter Sunday.
The US president was Harry S. Truman serving his second term in office having been reelected in 1948. US troops were still engaged in combat in Korea and would be for two more years. Just over a week later Ethel and Julius Rosenberg would be convicted of atomic espionage and would later be executed in Sing Sing’s electric chair. "Rawhide," directed by Henry Hathaway and starring Tyrone Power and Susan Hayward, would be released four days later, one of the most popular films of 1951. A hit song at the time was Perry Como’s "If (They Made Me a King)" written by Tolchard Evans, Robert Hargreaves, and Stanley J. Damerell, and recorded by Como in November 1950. Boswell's London Journal 1762-1763, edited by Frederick A. Pottle and published by Yale University Press in 1950, was one of the best selling books at the time. Televison was a relatively new invention, and in early 1951 people were watching "Circuit Rider," an early drama about the lives of evangelical clergymen who traveled across the new American states in the wake of the Revolutionary War. It aired on Sunday nights on ABC-TV between March 5 and May 7, 1951.
If you think about it, 69 years seems like an awfully long time. But think of it as 25,199 days. Or 604,776 hours. Or 36,286,560 minutes! That is pretty hard to fathom. How many times has my heart pulsed since that morning long ago? How many times have I blinked my eyes? Oh, if I had a dollar for each. And, if I got a good eight hours of sleep every night, that would mean I have slept away a third of my life . . . 23 years! Thankfully that was not the case. I had things to do. Places to go. People to see.
So where will this new year of life take me? What will I be able to accomplish? Hopefully, at the end of it all, I will still be raising a joyful noise. I have mixed feelings about this personal benchmark, so perhaps a middle finger salute is not the proper gesture at this juncture. Maybe a thumbs up instead? Regardless, I will just take comfort in my loving family and my many friends. It has been a good life so far, and I look forward to many more years in your good company.
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