Life, Work & Wonder

Tag: childhood

  • The Magic of Tick Tick Tick Tick Tick

    Tick Tick Tick Tick Tick.

    Is there any sound more powerful, authoritative, magical, than the Tick Tick Tick Tick Tick of 60 Minutes?

    That sound whisks me back 40 years, maybe even 50 years. To sitting in my grandparents’ living room on a Sunday evening after a family dinner. To All In The Family, and Barney Miller, and Mel’s Diner. To grandma and grandpa (and my cousin Gus) still alive and well. To mom and dad being in their youthful prime, Karrie being a kid. To knowing that my school friends would be at school with me the next day. It takes me back to Little League baseball. Youth basketball. 89er football. Dungeons and Dragons.

    Carter and/or Reagan are President. People still have pensions. Newspapers are still a thing. I have my entire life still ahead of me. And grandma and grandpa (and Gus) are still alive and well. And we’re all still young.

    60 Minutes isn’t perfect. It’s an entertainment show. But how much I love that Tick Tick Tick Tick Tick. And how it whisks me back in time to youth and Sunday evenings with my family.

    I love that Tick Tick Tick Tick Tick Tick so much. It’s magical. It’s a time machine. And I don’t even know (or care) if 60 Minutes is still on the air. I’m just grateful to the person who thought, You know what would be great? Opening the show with a giant pocket watch that goes Tick Tick Tick Tick Tick. Whereever they are, thank you for the magic you continue to bring me.

  • High School Was The Most Secure Time Of My Personal Life

    Describe a phase in life that was difficult to say goodbye to.

    I’ll never forget the last week of eighth grade.

    I skipped (with my parents’ permission) all the eighth grade ceremonies. It was an incredibly sunny week. And I just felt so much relief that I never had to go to junior high school again.

    I think most Americans look back on middle school with less-than-warm-and-fuzzy feelings. For me, it was an especially hellacious time of life. I was a late bloomer, meaning I was the smallest kid in the class, which overall I didn’t mind except I played sports and although I was more coordinated than most kids I was always battling for playing time against coaches who preferred bigger kids. Being a late bloomer also meant I looked like a 4th grader in a sea of kids who had overdeveloped bodies, which made the social circle kind of tough. And I was also an extremely hyperactive and talkative kid, which basically meant all my teachers despised me. It was two years from hell, actually.

    When that last week of junior high school hit, I swore that high school would be a different experience for me. That I’d try to find a way to blend in more.

    Whether it was because kids were more mature in high school, or I’d figured out how to blend in more, my high school experience was a much better experience.

    I got decent grades. Had my fair share of playing time in sports. And kids more or less left me alone. I was just a regular kid who went to school for seven hours, did the bare minimum of homework to get Bs, and then really really enjoyed my after school hours.

    I read a lot of books (ironically, rarely ones assigned for school). Played a lot of games. Played a lot of basketball. And spent a LOT of time laughing with (not at) classmates and friends.

    Although my time in actual class bored the heck out of me, I loved those years. I had extra spending money from part-time jobs. I had my friends. And I didn’t have a lot of responsibility, not like in the adult years when life is mostly drudgery for anyone who is wholly devoted to their family.

    With the exception of maybe a year or two in college, I’d never again know a life like this. It was a wonderful time. And at graduation — when most of my friends were celebrating — I remember feeling pretty mixed, because I knew (from watching my parents’ burdens) that a good time of my life was closing.

    Life is amazing. And there are always pockets of joy within any phase of life. But it was actually difficult to say goodbye to that time of my life that included high school.

  • If I Want To Live Forever, I Need Only Attend Corporate Presentations From Hell

    What bores you?

    There is the saying that only boring people are bored. But is that true?

    I’ve found in life that I’m rarely bored when left to my own devices. There is sooooooo much to do in life!!!! So many books to read, magazines to peruse, films to watch, exercises to do, hikes to take, places to explore. If I lived a thousand years, I couldn’t begin to cross everything off my list that I’d like to do. So for me, the problem isn’t boredom but sometimes of feeling overwhelmed.

    For me, the only time I feel bored is when I’m trapped. When I was a kid, that meant sitting in class with teachers who dictated what we had to do, or sitting in a class (e.g. shop class) where I had no interest. As an adult, it’s corporate mandated trainings and meetings. Life is an ETERNITY when I sit in these meetings. I feel so bored. So trapped. I feel like if I want to live forever, I should just spend every day in a Corporate Presentation. But who wants to live forever in that way? That’s like an eternity in hell.

    Have I ever left a corporate presentation Zoom call or a training or a meeting where I thought, that was worth my time? Not that I can think of. But I do feel like time has slowed down and that the day was 10 years long.

    So I’m rarely bored when left to my own devices. It’s when I’m forced to waste my time in meetings where I feel trapped and bored. If I want to live forever, I’ll just spend the rest of my life going to corporate meetings.

  • My Autobiography Title Would Be “Ugly Boy” (AKA Takes A Licking And Keeps On Ticking)

    If there were a biography about you, what would the title be?

    As a teen, I was teased a lot about my looks.

    But my favorite tale is the time in eighth grade when my classmate burst into class. “Hey everyone, get this!” He called out to the class. “Tony’s grandma was looking at our yearbook last night and stopped and pointed at a picture and said, ‘Now that boy’s ugly.’ So Tony looks who to see it was and it was Rob!” Of course, I’m Rob in that story, and I can still hear the laughter from my classmates.

    To make a long story short, that was a painful comment but I kept my head up. And I have many many faults, but I’m a reasonably confident person who didn’t let that teasing about my looks in my formative years bring me down and in fact had a lot of fun in my teen years. I’m actually kind of proud of that if I’m honest, that I hung in there and resisted the urge to withdraw from the world despite some heartless ribbing along the way.

    I’ve had a lot of luck in my life. But I’ve also had my share of times where I was kicked in the groin. I had undiagnosed autoimmune disease as a kid but somehow emerged from that reasonably productive as an adult. My first marriage was to a selfish narcissist who eventually kicked me to the curb after extracting every morsel that she possibly could from me but again I emerged from that too (and today am re-married to a much better person). And perhaps luckiest of all, I was diagnosed with a potentially terminal (50/50) lung disease at age 42 but not only survived that but emerged from it mostly okay.

    So I feel like I’ve lived a lucky life where I have so much to be grateful for, but also one where I’m frequently called “Ugly Boy” (mostly figuratively but one time literally) that I have had to stave off and then emerge from. And I have done just that.

    I feel so fortunate for all that. So grateful for that. I am proud to say that I was called “Ugly Boy.” And that I emerged from that a-oh-kay 🙂

  • A Walk In The Rain

    This morning during my early morning walk it rained.

    Typically a Seattle rain is a drizzle, but today it was actual rain, a rain that I wasn’t actually expecting (for some reason I forgot it was supposed to rain this morning) and by the end of my 35 minute tour of the neighborhood I was drenched. My jacket was wet, my sweats were wet and my shoes were drenched enough that my socks were also wet.

    In a perfect world, I would have changed clothes and had a warm cup of coffee. But I arrived home just in time to drive my daughter to class, so rather than changing into dry clothes I hopped into the car with my drenching wet clothes to battle traffic for an hour.

    It was fine. I was fine. I eventually dried and am at no risk of dying from pneumonia or anything, but it was unpleasant driving in my wet shoes and socks, especially since I kept thinking how nasty my feet were going to be by the time I got home in an hour especially since I’m a week overdue for my pedicure 🙂 (note: I get a pedicure Thursday, thank goodness).

    I grew up in Seattle. Which means I went to school in Seattle. Which means I walked many many days to school in the rain, especially in grade school, since in the 1970s and 1980s kids still walked to school and NO kid back then wore rainproof clothes unless they wanted to be teased (no Seattleite wore rain gear back then. Why? I don’t know. A misguided badge of honor, maybe).

    Most rainy days in Seattle are mostly damp days, wherein it’s not dry but it’s not really rainy either. But I do remember some of the soaking rainstorms that accompanied me to school as a kid, and I do remember quite a few days arriving at grade school pretty drenched. We didn’t think too much about it I think, but now I’m realizing how unpleasant it must have been to sit in school all morning with soaking wet clothes. How does someone learn their multiplication tables and how to diagram a sentence when their clothes are wet?

    Then, after school, we often played in the rain. I remember the countless days of playing basketball where there was a puddle just underneath the hoop, and we knew to watch our dribble around that puddle since the puddle more-or-less served as an extra defender. Then, after we were done playing and soaked to the bone, we went home. And no one I knew changed their clothes when we got home — we just let them air dry as we continued on with our evening

    I think of all the distractions we had in school back then. There wasn’t really snacking back then so I remember my stomach growling in that final hour before lunch. I think of the 60 minute oneway bus rides that commenced at 6:45am because I was part of the district’s busing program during high school. How sleepy I was so often throughout the day at school after my 5am wake-up time. And I think of all the days I sat in class with soaking wet clothes and feet. How in the heck was I able to concentrate through all that?

    I’m grateful we live in a different world now. A world where I don’t think kids have to walk to school in the rain, and sit in the classroom with soaking wet clothes. A world where when we get wet, or when our kids get wet, we change into dry clothes. And I’m grateful I have a life in which a big deal is wet clothes or a long bus ride — there are people in this world who’d give anything to have a life where these are considered problems at all. I’m grateful to live in a world where my problems are first world problems.