Sixty or so years seems a long time. It seems so until one gradually begins to notice that years are becoming months, months are becoming days and days eye-blinks. And once one notices that phenomenon one becomes aware of a key property of the phenomenon. The interval of the animated gif we call life is set to variable-accelerate. At the point of that realization markers that have long been a part of one's life begin to become one's life. The other key property of the phenomenon is that the markers are retrieved randomly. If they were laid sequentially end to end they would tell a story that would be the story of the years they represent. But they aren't sequential; they are random. And that's where it gets interesting.
My sixty or so years have put me in the middle of several of the significant events that occurred during that time. I have a bronze star from Vietnam. I am a retired IBM manager. I survived the Roman Catholic education system. I hunted when hunting was still something one did. I water-skied until I got too affluent to own a boat small enough to throw a water skiable wake. I ran until one day in le Jardin du Luxembourg a sharp, pointed piece of flint finished off one of my toes. In the wake of the toe incident I even survived being a member of Group Health Co-operative and escaped to the outer world where real doctors practiced.
But those things and many more are just facts. How I survived the year in Vietnam, having drawn the conclusion early that the endeavor was the biggest waste of life and wealth that the human race had ever embarked upon, and how I prevailed
working for a corporation when I was the least likely candidate for corporate life extant at the time, and how all those years were filled with people and events - perhaps less obviously consequential than those noted above - but weirdly funny and entertaining - When told non-sequentially become a fast paced movie-like mélange of a story.
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