Random Thoughts from a Restless Mind

1) Commute. Spent 13 hours in a car, mostly riding shotgun, mostly under a 35 lb. dog.

It would be so much easier if there was a single podcast that could keep my attention for more than a single hour.

2) Telepathy. Having said that, we listened to 4 episodes of a podcast dedicated to the possibility that non-speaking autistic individuals have the ability to read minds. Not only that but have the ability to communicate with one another without geographic limitations. The experiments provide compelling evidence that it is real. You really, really want to believe it.

The only problem? Science. Not only is there no proposed mechanism of action discussed, none of the principals make even a perfunctory effort to come up with one.

Faith and hope are lovely concepts, but if you want me to get on board you really gotta give me a bit of science.

3) Soldier. As in Canadian Soldier, a 3/4″ bug that looks very much like a tiny little replica of the plane flown by the Wright Brothers that invades the southern coast of Lake Erie every year on Father’s Day. By the millions. They live just long enough to provide a weekend treat to the thousands of Walleye swimming just off the coast. Except for the 10’s of millions that end up in piles in parking lots and as pancakes on American cars. Here and gone in less than a week.

Every. Single. Year.

4) Nail. “Did you nail it, or did you get away with it?” Andy Stumpf. Retired Navy SEAL, Wingsuit Flyer, Podcaster and Author.

I met Andy in April of 2005 or 2006 when he was running the 2nd phase of BUDs training at the SEAL NSW on Coronado Island. My earliest written pieces that showed up in the CrossFit world each Sunday had attracted the attention of a couple of active duty SEALS including Andy, and he invited me to visit NSW when I was in San Diego at a professional convention. It was an incredibly meaningful invitation and experience, one for which I am eternally grateful to Andy and his fellow SEALs.

And so it was that I stumbled upon his guest appearance on the podcast hosted by Andrew Huberman, the self-described Ambassador of Health Science to the lay population. Andy made the above comment in the context of describing the paper thin line between actually being good enough to have pulled off an incredibly difficult feat, or catching just enough lightning in your bottle to have gotten away with it. The topic he and Huberman were discussing was whether or not the most experienced wingsuit flyers were really that good or just that lucky.

There’s a lot of meat on that bone, no matter what you do for work or pleasure.

Think about Andy’s first job, active Navy SEAL. Turn a corner in an active theater and encounter another human. Friend or foe? Think about a trauma surgeon encountering a bullet fragment near the spinal cord. Adjacent or abutting? Less dramatic but certainly impactful, you have your finger on the button that buys or sells $10BB worth of oil company stock. Are those tankers moving through or stuck?

Some people really ARE that good. When they make a decision that goes well they more than likely really DID nail it. Other times, no matter how good they might be, when Scottie or Rory leave the pin in and a putt that’s destined to end up 10′ by slams into the pin and goes in, well, even they know that they got away with it.

Again, lots to contemplate here, but my take away is that the men and women who really are so good at whatever it is they do they nail it almost all the time, are also the men and women who know deep down when they just go away with it.

5). 95. Today would have been my Dad’s 95th birthday. It’s pretty good to be a Dad, or to have a Dad whose birthday comes around near, or on Father’s Day. It’s especially cool if you and one or several of your kids share something that you are passionate about, even more so if you can do it together. And I am quite sure it doesn’t matter what it is. For instance, I discovered that my buddy Karl’s birthday was yesterday. Karl and his son were both extraordinary high school and college baseball players. What are they doing? I got a picture of them sitting together today at the NCAA Final Four game between Oklahoma (Karl’s alma mater) and UNC (home town team).

Our game with my Dad, at least for my brother and one of our brothers-in-law, was golf. It’s such a cliche it’s almost comical, right? Father, and or grandfather puts a club in a boy’s hand at–pick it–2 or 4 or 10 years old in the hope that one day at 12 or 14 or 30 he might stand beside the tee box and watch that same son launch one. My brother saw my nephew get his first ever hole-in-one last month. If memory serves my Dad saw one of my brother’s. Full circle, that. I know that the same kind of thing happens with a father and a child sitting on a boat holding fishing poles, or walking in a pheasant-filled field with shotguns at the ready. The first time a son or a daughter aces Dad on the court. Same feels.

But for my brother and for me it was golf. On the course with Dad as playing partners or caddying for him and his buddies. Golf was our entré into his world. Again, it’s so often the venue it’s almost trite. I’m sitting here watching the U.S. Open, just me and Beth and the dogs, and I stumbled across a clip from the Golf Channel of one of the Amateurs who qualified into the field and then made the 36 hole cut. He would get to play the weekend at the U.S. flipping Open as a 17 year old amateur. Are you a golfer? Did you ever dream such a dream? You played in the U.S. Open and made the cut. Did you win? That’s just so outrageous I couldn’t even dream it. But make the cut? Sure, I dreamed of making the cut and what it would be like walking up to the green on the 72nd hole.

So there I was, getting ready to muse and watching the Open on NBC while I surfed around Twitter and LinkedIn and Facebook ( I don’t have the bandwidth to add Instagram or TikTok). Up comes a video on the Golf Channel of 17 year old amateur Miles Russell walking up the fairway of the 72nd hole. As the talking heads told the audience that young Miles had been introduced to golf by his Dad, who’d been gifted the game by his GrandDad, the camera pans to Miles’ caddy outside the rope taking his caddy vest off and putting it on Dad. The caddy ducks under the ropes and off the course as Dad shoulders the bag and makes the walk up 18 side by side with his son.

I tried…I really tried to tell Beth why I was crying.

11 years ago I went to Rhode Island to be with my Dad for his birthday and Father’s Day. Dementia had stolen him from us. He lived in a world that alternated between times of comfort not seen in more than 50 years, and panic-stricken moments when he was unable to find the GPS coordinates of the here and now. Unaware that we would lose him in 4 short months, I was blessed with a brief moment of clarity. A tiny gift of time my Dad and I got to share, memorialized in “A Brief Father’s Day Visit From My Dad”. Here it is, again, 11 years later.

“My siblings and I only need to remember one weekend each year when it comes to celebrating my Dad. His birthday almost always falls within a day or two of Father’s Day. So it was that I found myself in Rhode Island the past couple of days, in the company of my Mom and a guy masquerading as my Dad, a guy who was very curious about the new fella who’d dropped by for a visit.

Getting old is not for sissies, my friends.

Somewhere inside, deep inside, there’s still some of my Dad in the jumbled up connections of his mind, carried by the body that failed him in such spectacular fashion 2 ½ years ago. Dad is extremely intelligent, the only family member in his generation to have gone to college. Quite the athlete, he used football and the GI Bill to pay for school. Like so many in his generation he then worked, raised a family, and put himself through grad school. He won his club championship in golf twice at the ages of 50 and 60. No typo. Beat the reigning RI State Amateur champ on his home course for the first one.

As we sat on the porch of his house overlooking the 14th hole, I had an ever so brief visit from that guy. From my Dad. Like a citizen of Brigadoon he came slowly through the mist of his mind to join me for a bit. We’d always bonded over golf. My brother and I never turned down an invitation to join him on the course, either as partners or as caddies for him and his buddies. It was quite a privilege to do either; my Dad’s most elemental essence was expressed on the golf course.

A light breeze was blowing through the forest in the back yard just beyond the rough. We chuckled at the golfers who failed to take the wind into consideration, sheepishly trying to sneak into the yard to retrieve their out-of-bounds second shot. Dad talked about caddying as a kid in the Depression. We both noted the absence of caddies as the foursomes passed in and out of view. It was really very nice.

I quite like the Dad of my adulthood. Quick to smile, slow to anger, unfailingly loyal and kind. It’s hard to imagine how distant he was when I was a boy, his friendship as an adult is so easy. I’m not sure how long we sat there to be honest, nor when I noticed that he was slipping away. As surely as the village of Brigadoon disappears, the mist had returned to claim him. I got up, walked over to his chair, held his hand and gave him a kiss. I wished him a Happy Birthday and a Happy Father’s Day, hoping that I’d made it on time. That he was still there. That he knew it was me, Darrell, his oldest child. I told him I loved him.

He smiled and gave my hand a little pat as he disappeared into the mist.”

Happy 95th Birthday Dad, and Happy Father’s Day. I miss you every day; it just seems like it’s always a little bit more today.

I’ll see you next week…

1) Heat. Spending a week in our southern outpost. Almost 3 months later in the year than we said we ever would. 97 degrees today.

Wet or dry, that’s just hot.

2) Bugs. The no seeums are out in full force. You can hear them and you can for sure feel them.

They seem to like the heat.

3) Election. Seems they’re having one down here, too. It’s hard to tell who has more money backing them since everyone has 3 ads in running in every break.

On the upside, that’s 3 times I don’t have to watch one of the ambulance-chasing lawyer ads that normally pollute my TV.

4) AI. Man, AI giveth and AI taketh away, doesn’t it? We added so-called ambient scribing via AI-guided recording. Should save us a bunch of typing time while also allowing us to more accurately divine the issues our patients want us to address and how we plan to do so. Learning new stuff always slows the roll for a bit, and we are certainly seeing our collective roll slowed.

But our biggest problem is using a product that isn’t really ready for prime time.

All AI stuff kinda works like this if you think about it. You get whatever version is the latest iteration of your chosen model, and in general it is a time saver because of your understanding of just what it can do for you right now. For example, I have an 11 mile commute to the office; v1.0 of Chat could tell me every detail about every landmark on the way in seconds. What does it matter that it took until v3.0 to chart a course for a shuttle through the asteroid belt, a trip I won’t ever take?

In task-specific software targeted at an industry that is suffering from inefficiency that affects outcomes there are unaligned priorities between players, in this case practicing physicians and the companies that develop and sell the tech we use. You can absolutely sell software or an AI program that has a finite list of areas where they can be applied, and you can even sell it before it’s really ready but admitting that it is a beta-version: not really ready for use by the masses. What you really shouldn’t do is sell any kind of product that can only be used in a small fraction of the daily circumstances encountered by your customer, in this case me, without disclosing that fact up front, out loud, and often.

I bought the beta version of a product that was marketed and sold to me as a finished, out of the box and ready to use. In the tiny slice of my daily life in which I can use it I am impressed and hopeful. For the 80% of my day in which it either doesn’t work or even worse increases the work that must be done, it’s hard to escape the fact that I am paying for a beta version.

And what this AI taketh is my time.

5) Happiness. “Happiness is quality of life minus envy”. Most recently the comedian and writer Jimmy Carr.

Once again, to the well of “enough”. Quality of life begins with having our needs met. Food, shelter, clothing. Community; we are social creatures and very much need the company of others. Safety from as much preventable harm as possible; I’m reminded of the need for air conditioning in a southern summer as much as this last northern winter reminded me of the dangers of the cold. In our American society the able need a means to provide this for themselves and any others whose needs they must cover. Think job for the head(s) of a family household. Second order needs, those things without which one would struggle to cover the most basic needs. Think transportation and communication. In a developed world these second order things should also be considered needs.

What, then, is Quality of Life (QOL)? Once you have both first and second order needs met, what defines QOL? It’s a tidy little phrase, but as I sit here thinking about it, QOL is not as intuitively definable, at least not in the same way that I find “needs” to be definable. You may certainly disagree with my definition of needs, but you are unlikely to struggle to find your own version. QOL on the other hand is a pretty personal, subjective kind of thing. Every human requires protein to survive, a clear example drilling down into the need for food.

You may feel that your quality of life will suffer if your protein does not come in the form of beef tenderloin served medium rare and surrounded by puff pastry.

But if I take a stab at what QOL might be I would start with the effort required to obtain those needs. How arduous are the mechanics around meeting your needs? How much of your time is consumed in the process and in recovering after you’ve done so? There has to be time left over in order to have the rest of a life.

How collegial is your slice of society? I’ve written here and elsewhere that ultimately happiness is driven in large part by the size and quality of your closest personal connections (see: The Happiness Project, a compilation of the most recent data from the study of happiness that began with the Harvard Class of 1955). In order to acquire and tend to your close personal relationships, friendships and family, you can’t spend all of your time meeting your needs or recovering from your efforts. Loneliness is a major drag on QOL; close friends is likely THE major building block.

Is there fun to be had in your life? Stuff that makes you smile or laugh almost always increases QOL. There are likely a million or so Knicks fans whose QOL is markedly elevated today after the Knicks clinched their first NBA championship in 53 years. They had an awful lot of fun last night! Beyond breaking the law or only finding the fun in someone else’s unhappiness I don’t think there are a lot of rules and regulations on what you might find makes you happy.

There’s a pattern here. All of this is about you. What you need. What is fulfilling and what makes you happy. There really isn’t anyone else in the picture. What someone else has isn’t in the equation unless it is something that brings happiness to someone who is in your close circle of friends. I mean, you’re happy when your BFF is happy, aren’t you? Your QOL necessarily goes up when the people you care about are happy. Honestly, while there is a bunch of things that make me happy, nothing makes me happier than just being around Beth when she is happy. Happy by proxy is still happy.

If your QOL as I’ve just defined it is high, if all of your needs are covered and you have the time to enjoy your closest people, then by definition you must have enough. That makes sense, right? The car you drive gets you where you need to go whether or not your neighbor drives something bigger or newer or fancier. Your clothes might not have a chic logo and the soles of your best dress shoes may not be bright red, but I’m betting you look really good in the stuff you wear. And come on, you and I both know that Gucci logo adorns 10 times as many fakes as it does the real McCoy anyway.

It’s all just stuff.

Envy is wanting something simply because someone else has it. The bigger house or the faster car or maybe the more prestigious club membership. It’s OK to want something. Heck, sometimes having something you want badly enough sets you up for the happiness that comes with having a goal and making it happen. Envy comes along with something that feels an awful lot like jealousy. Envy seeks to turn happiness into a zero sum game in which someone else’s happiness somehow comes at the expense of yours. Someone else’s win somehow becomes your loss. Somehow your QOL gets downgraded in the face of someone else’s, or what you observe is someone else’s QOL.

My buddy Mel is a pastor in a Baptist church. I still think about the sermon he gave the first time I visited for Sunday service. He was talking about how different folks receive different blessings at different times, and how that sometimes generated what sure sounds like envy in those who felt they were less blessed. Mel’s take? “I am happy about your blessings. Your blessings bring me joy. I do not need to worry about your blessings. Your blessings will not keep my blessings from coming. I think of my blessings up above, floating in a circle far above me, just waiting for the right time to come down. I don’t need to worry about your blessings. My blessings are on the way.”

Blessings, like QOL, are not a zero sum game. One person’s blessings does not mean that another’s blessings will not be on the way.

We are all exposed to the QOL of a much wider swath of humanity than we were in times past. Where once we had classic “appointment TV” in which we “saw” a slice of life that may have looked like it was in some way “better” than what we had at the time, now we are literally bombarded with stories and images of a strata that we once didn’t even know existed. Somehow this is what we need in order to be satisfied with our own QOL? I’m not sure I understand why.

Maybe it’s because my own QOL has had some pretty significant ups and downs over the course of my lifetime, but for the life of me I can’t really remember much unhappiness. Sure, there have been harder times. The three years of my residency in New York? Yah, those were hard times. That big pay cut that we took to start my own practice, the one that was only supposed to last a year or so? Boy, those 6 or 7 years it actually lasted were hard, for sure. Stuff that factors into my QOL if I ever think about it, things like going out to dinner, something that has made me happy since I was a three year old tagging along with my beloved grandparents, they just all dried up for long periods of time during my life. There was no joining my college mates at the fancy NYC steak joints or going dutch at the French bistro on the lake with our Cleveland friends during those times.

But I don’t really remember being less happy. I have mostly memories of happiness, even during the hard times. I had pretty much everything I needed. I definitely wished for the times to be easier, but I don’t know that I wished for anything that I was missing. For sure I didn’t begrudge those around me who had more, or who seemed to have it easier. It never occurred to me how that might have eased my passage.

H = QOL – E. Our Quality of Life begins with covering our first and second order needs while we assemble our closest circles of friends and family. The more time we get with those closest to us, especially when they are happy, the higher our QOL rises. Envy may be the variable over which we have the greatest degree of control. Imagine if we simply turn that “E” on its head, finding happiness in the blessings of others rather than lamenting that those blessings had arrived for them and not yet for us. A kind of anti-envy, if you will.

After all, at least for most of us, my friend Mel continues to be more right than not. We need not covet or resent the blessings of those around us who may appear to have more. At what level of QOL measured against the moving targets set by envy would we ever find that elusive entity, “enough”? Because “enough” is the feast. “Enough” means there’s nothing on the right side of that equation in the minus column. Once you make the “E” in Envy precisely zero it becomes the “E” in Enough.

And that “E” is what eventually brings those blessings home to us. Like a new variable that multiplies your Quality of Life and along with it, your Happiness.

I’ll see you next week, and that, too, makes me happy…

1) June 7th.

Mancub: Papi, am I going to see you on Sunday?

Me: I dunno Bubby. Why, what’s up?

Mancub: It’s June 7th!

Me: And?

Mancub: Six Seeeeven!

Love my Mancub!

2) Rosenblatt. #2 in the latest list of ways to “stay old” from Roger Rosenblatt: marry above your station. His thesis on this is that your station is most likely low enough that you can’t help but “marry up”. I get the sense that he is mostly directing this toward his fellow fellows. Can’t really muster up much in the way of defense on this one of course.

I’m the guy married to his “Better 95%” after all.

3) Newport. I really love the monthly magazine supplements to the weekend edition of the WSJ and the Sunday Times. Occasionally there is a cool article, albeit one mostly there as a part of a marketing campaign for a movie or a book or the latest super hot fashion designer. You know the type of spread that is…clothes that no sane person would ever be caught dead in out in public, even the impossibly skinny boys and girls modeling them.

This Saturday brought tidings from Newport, R.I., stomping grounds of my youth. Supposedly Newport has been overtaken by a swarm of Millennials. Perhaps a re-boot of the original upper crust colonizers of Newport society, the less ambitious, less bright, better looking second children of New York wealth according to my pal Julie Bowen. I find myself a bit puzzled by this invasion though; all of the rich folks who populated Newport when I was a knuckle-dragging college kid always seemed awfully happy. All those pretty boys and girls in my WSJ Magazine are scowling or pouting.

Come on. You’re in Newport for free wearing a pair of shoes that cost enough money to rent a house on the beach in Narragansett for a month. Whaddaya say…give us a smile, eh?

4) Ali. “It isn’t the mountain that wears you down, it’s the pebble in your shoe.” –Muhammad Ali

Ali died 10 years ago this weekend. Here we see the deep understanding that this giant among mere mortals had for the trials and tribulations of everyone else. Who among us must actually give consideration to the mountain at all? Every day, though, each of us must plod on in the face of chronic constant discomfort. Just getting to the next challenge can sometimes seem to be insurmountable. Ali understood. Perhaps this, more than anything, explains why it was that every single person who was ever blessed to speak with him felt that Ali spoke for them, believed in them, cheered for them.

Knew them.

Ali had a kind of courage that I still find awe-inspiring all these years later. It’s humbling to think about the simply monumental societal issues that landed in his path, uninvited and unprovoked. At age 24 Ali received his draft induction card. Having recently converted to Islam, Ali declined to serve and was stripped of his titles. Thus began 3 years of exile during which he struggled to support himself and his family. Three years of being hated by a majority of Americans. The likelihood that he would have actually been asked to carry a rifle and plod through the rice paddies along with the rest of the American servicemen was precisely zero. Think Elvis Presley. He must have known this, and yet he drew his line in the sand and refused.

I’m pretty sure it does’t really matter when we consider this whether or not you (or your parents, or your grandparents) agree or disagree with the particulars of his stance. Like almost every male in my age group I registered for the draft, and like so very many white suburban kids I would have spent almost all of my draftable years as a student, high and dry and thousands of miles away from the war. We didn’t discuss this at home; I have no idea what my Korean War vet Dad thought. I do remember thinking then, as I still regrettably think today, that what he did took a simply unimaginable amount of courage, a courage that I wasn’t ( and aren’t) sure I had (have).

Who among us hasn’t been faced with something that is hugely important, where right and wrong is a stark black or white, 0 or 1 binary question, where we just know with our heart and soul what we should do? There’s always a catch, though. A price to pay. Doing the right thing, even speaking out on behalf of the right thing, will have severe consequences for you or your loved ones or both. Your boss is a racist or a misogynist, perpetually abusing the weaker in your midst. Do you speak up, knowing it likely will cost you your job? A powerful interest group has descended upon your community and is singling out a group of which you are not a part, institutionalizing a prejudice that causes harm to innocents. Do you speak out, knowing that you will now be a target for a vengeful, wrathful power? The government has trained its regulatory aim squarely at your business, singling your world out for unfair attention just because it can. Do you speak out, knowing you will come under such withering scrutiny that you will likely be destroyed?

It’s not just being aware of the injustice, not just acknowledging the injustice, it’s doing so in the face of certain danger to you, or to you and your loved ones. Could you do it? Granted, Ali was 24 at the time of his stand, had come from little and had relatively little to worry about in terms of collateral damage, but still, there he was, walking away from the peak and willingly walking into the valley. Could you do that? Could you have done it at 24, even if you were just one more pebble in the shoe guy, with little to lose and little risk to those you loved? Could you do it during 40’s when you were a shoe-in success, your 50’s or your 60’s when you’ve crested the peak and it would be too late to go back to the bottom and start the climb again?

That question has led to more than a few sleepless nights for me over the years, including the night after I heard that Muhammad Ali, the man who introduced me to the possibility that the answer could be ‘yes’, had died. And last night, when I knew that I would write about this again. I confess that, while hopeful, I am still not entirely sure what my answer would be now, 10 years on, were I to be confronted with such a question.

I’ll see you next week…

This piece appeared in Random Thoughts 8 years ago as I contemplated my 40th High School Reunions. Funny that it comes up today. I have been trying to rally the troops in my medical school class for our 40th scheduled for this coming October. It’s hard to believe but my 50th high school reunions (I went to two high schools because of a family move) are only 2 years away! Good, bad, or ugly, the 10 years between 40 and 50 have seen plenty of personal evolution, too.

“2018 is the year of my 40th high school reunions (we moved after my freshman year so I have two). It’s a nice time to return to one of my frequent themes, identity. Who are you when you are all alone, just you and the mirror? Who are you when you are in any particular group of people? Do you feel that there is more confluence between those versions of you than not? How much confluence do yo think there is between who you think you are and who it is that those around you think you are? As this is my 40th year away from my classmates, have you evolved from who you thought you were and who your classmates thought you were over the years?

First a couple of disclaimers. One should not be all that too terribly concerned about the thoughts of others since this gives all too much power to individuals who may not have your best interests at heart. Sorry, but our world is altogether too filled with people who will opt to climb over your downtrodden psychological carcass if you allow them to do so. Also, there is no reason for you to ossify as an individual at any stage of your life. Indeed, if you haven’t evolved since high school you’re probably doing it wrong.

Over the years I admit that I have not made much of an effort to remain in contact with the vast majority of my classmates in either of my childhood towns. I could certainly lay the blame for that on my Dad who held that true friendships were rare and the effort to stay in touch with acquaintances too arduous for the ROI. The truth is more that I’ve always done the deepest dive possible into whatever ocean of opportunity I happened to be sailing on at any given moment; those oceans have always been rather distant from the shores of my youth.

Facebook has made it rather easy to re-forge ties, however delicate the fibers may be. These tiny, tenuous connections have left me very curious about my childhood mates. Much to the surprise (and amusement) of my family I have found myself moving all kinds of the chess pieces of my life so that I can attend both reunions. Who will I meet when I do? With the exception of a very few people I still do chat with, literally everyone I see will be someone I am pretty much meeting for the first time.

40 years is a lot of years of growth and change.

Who will my classmates be meeting when they see me for the first time in at least 30 years (I went to one school’s 10th)? Judging by a post on our Reunion FB page in which a classmate unearthed some commentary about our class from graduation I will be largely unrecognizable. You see (and this gets back to who you think you are and who others see you as being) what I once thought of as self-assurance and confidence came across (to some people at least) as self-centeredness and arrogance. This is not really a revelation mind you, nor is the re-appearnace of this item distressing. I’ve long held that I was an arrogant putz when I was a young man, although that may have been a part of whatever successes I may have accrued over the years; I pretty much always assumed I was gonna turn out OK.

What does bother me though, at least the me of the last 20 or so years, is the possibility (probability?) that my younger self may have run roughshod over people who didn’t deserve anything rough out of me at all. That does make me sad, frankly. You see, a large part of my own personal development, the ongoing changes to the person I try to see in the mirror (and project for any and all to see in me) is a foundation of kindness in all that I do and in all that I am. It’s hard–no, impossible– to be good at all times, and I’m not sure at all that you can be truly kind always and everywhere. But you can try, and it is in the trying that I have evolved over the years.

Who will my classmates remember as they think about our upcoming reunions? Will our memories of the children we were be so strong that we will be prevented from seeing the adults we have become? Regardless it’s been an interesting part of the journey to be reminded of who people thought I was so long ago and to peruse the pages of each intervening “Yearbook” as I’ve gone from cocky teenage jock to whatever it is I am today.

Wow. 40 years.”