God and Man (and Machine)

The past year or so has seen an incredible explosion about "artificial intelligence" (AI). Much of the discussion has focused on potential threats to humanity from machines - job losses, Terminator-style dystopian fantasies about the rise of SkyNet. Hackers.

Some of these threats seem more real than others (spoiler: the machines do not have to replicate human intelligence; they just have to be good enough. So yes. Most of the jobs of today are in fact at risk.)

But one thing I find intriguing is something not discussed.

What do we owe our creations.

A few years ago, the film Blade Runner was released. It is a movie based on the dystopian novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by the science fiction writer Philip K Dick.

The (brief) plot-line is that there is a race of androids called "replicants" that have been engineered with narrowly circumscribed super-human skills. For various reasons, the machines are banned from Earth, in part because (I suspect) of the apparent threats that they pose to people. The anti-hero of the movie is a bounty hunter named Decker (played in the film by Harrison Ford). It is the job of "blade runners" to eliminate any replicants that alight on the earth. In the novel (but not the movie), it is revealed that Decker himself is actually a replicant.

A question posed by the movie and increasingly now in our AI-evolving world is, is it moral for blade runners to hunt and kill replicants? 

What do we owe our creations? 

I’ve not seen the original Blade Runner in several years, but the question of whether it is “morally right” to kill the replicants - and the more existential question about what rights the replicants themselves have - is a terribly complex one in my mind’s eye.

Now, I’ve read some of Philip K Dick’s work. The question of what defines humanity itself is embedded in the story. I don’t recall clearly whether the replicants are in the film are revealed to be fully human, cyborgs (cybernetic organisms - part organic and part mechanical), or fully robots. In the book Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, the “replicants” are mechanical in nature.

It reminds me a bit as well of the movie AI: Artificial Intelligence. In that story, also of a dystopian future, human beings have created machines that increasingly simulate human beings. Like the replicants in Blade Runner, the machines are designed to fulfil specific “needs” of people. There are workers, sex robots, and of course, the protagonist of the story, David, who simulates a child for a couple whose natural-born human child is in a coma.

Both stories, to me, raise questions:

What defines humanity? Is it our physical, outward appearance? Our sentience? Our ability to feel (or simulate) emotions and empathy? Is it simply our DNA?

What responsibilities do we as creators owe those things that we create? I think about this from time to time in an eschatological sense - as a believing Christian, we believe that human beings were created by God himself in His image. Other monotheistic religions have similar systems of belief.

If God made man, what does God owe mankind?

The people in both Blade Runner and AI have created nearly perfect simulations of themselves, placed them on the Earth, and have responsibility for them. In some ways, this is similar to the relationship between God and man.

In a purely practical sense, most people accept that it is moral to defend the helpless, and in Blade Runner, Roy (the leader played in the film memorably by Rutger Hauer) has killed a number of people. Some, it could be argued, in defence; others in revenge (e.g., Tyrell, the head of the Tyrell Corporation, who make the replicants). Others for no reason really given (Sebastian, who befriends Roy and Pris). Roy is dangerous to people, some of whom have nothing to do with the creation and mistreatment of the replicants. In this sense, it is arguable that killing Roy is a protective measure, and thus is defensible.

In a larger sense, the issue of whether it is moral to create sentient humanoids simply to serve as slaves with intentionally short lifespans, and who are aware that they will die in approximately five years, must be grappled with.

So it’s a morally ambiguous situation that, beyond asking whether it is moral to kill the replicants, one should ask what responsibility we have to those things we create.

Like it or not, and John Searle to the side, we are getting close to the point where we, like God Himself, are making arguably sentient beings in our own image. So I suspect we should begin to at least think about what our responsibility to our creations might look like.

Long Time Ago, When We Was Fab

Today was my birthday; human beings like to assign significance to events that, outside our need to put things into boxes, put labels on those boxes, and then put the labelled boxes on the shelves in our minds, really have little significance to the world. Dates are human creations that help us track and in some sense fashion a feeling of control. 

We like to say "today, I am a year older." 

In any case, this year was a "big" one, again owing to the arbitrariness of the way we sort and order the world. I am 55 - officially by some measures a "senior." Of course, 55 is not hugely different from 54 or 56, but as human being have five fingers on one hand, and ten in total, we exist in a base-ten universe, so 55 is seen as more important.

Am I "old" now? Not significantly older than I was yesterday, or even a year ago. Much older than when I wrote my first blog post 17 years ago.

I recently was in a discussion in another virtual forum, where I was asked when I first realized I was getting "old." Well, it’s said that age creeps up on you. In my opinion, this is not correct. Getting old is not something like a car overtaking you on the road.

It just….happens.

The forum offered what I found to be interesting answers, but I can say the first time I really felt like I was ‘getting old’ was when I was 43.

43 is a prime number, so it has no real significance in the way that 30 or 40 or 50 do. 43 was well after I graduated from college, had my first job, first home. It was after I got married and after my son was born.

Whilst all of those things made me fell like an adult, none made me feel old.

The clear, obvious emergence of mortality is the thing that jolted me into the reality of age.

When I was 43 years old, I received news that a friend from college, a good guy named Ben, had been diagnosed with glioblastoma. I am an epidemiologist, and had done some projects in this area, so I was aware of the numbers.

I remember writing here at the time about Ben and his diagnosis:

When our son was a toddler, his favourite book was an illustrated book of Mother Goose rhymes; among them was the tale of a Packet, captained by a duck. The fantastical ship in the story is "laden with pretty things." We read the book through together so many times that it became dog-eared and the binding eventually came apart. Even as a three-year-old, he could repeat the rhymes just by looking at the pictures.

I was thinking about this little rhyme this morning when I read the postings of an old college friend who last night went in for neurosurgery to remove a tumour from his brain. Ben, a classmate of mine, had been on the baseball team with me at Dartmouth as well as a singer in the Dartmouth Aires, a quite competitive a cappella singing group. Ben apparently had a seizure and was admitted to hospital, where the tumour was found.

Like Ben, I am 43 years old - not at terrible risk for mortality, but certainly entering the age where it is becoming obvious that we need to pay attention to our health if we are not already. Personally, I took up running 20 years ago following my first wake-up call - the death of my own father from cancer.

There is a less-than famous quote to the effect that in life, the only ship that is guaranteed to come in is a black one. Rich and poor; famous and obscure; powerful and powerless - we all await the same fate.

I had of course seen death before. As noted, my father died of lung cancer in 1994, when I was still in school. I had a classmate at Dartmouth who shot himself. Another drowned canoeing on the Connecticut River.

When I was in grad school, at one point I considered jumping off a bridge. So death was not really a strange or “old man” concept.

But these were different.

Ben responded to his initial surgery and treatment, but the cancer returned a couple of years later, and he was unable to beat it the second time.

More than a decade has now passed, and in the subsequent years, I’ve obviously gotten older. Age and knee problems have forced me to stop running. My son, then a young kid, grew up and is now in college in another state. My older brother died last year.

All of these make it clear that I am not young now.

But finding out the fate of my friend Ben, whom I remember as a young guy playing first base at Dartmouth was when I was awakened to the fact that I am getting old.

Where There's Music and There's People, and They're Young and Alive

 

2024 is now more than a week old; the year got off to a great start, spending the first week (more or less) in Maui, our family's "happy place." We've been going out just about every year for the past 20, and have seen our son in a sense 'grow up' there. 

As a barely one-year-old, I can remember waking at four in the morning and carrying him around the beach walk in the darkness. Listening to the waves and waiting for the sun to rise. Then as a toddler, learning to swim in the pool and making sand castles. Now, he is on the edge of adulthood. 

Who knows how many more trips we have left?

One of my personal favourite things about being in the Islands is that Ka'anapali is west-facing, which means that on a clear day, we can watch the sun sink slowly into the distance over the Pacific.

It reminded me of a time, many years ago. 

Recently, I was asked a question - what is a favorite memory you hold onto of feeling alive? What made you feel that way? How long did the feeling last?

I could fall back on a number of quite significant things. All are terrific memories.

Being in Maui and seeing those golden sunsets brings me back to a far more prosaic time.

In the fall of 1995, I was living in Fremont, California, a suburban city about an hour south and east of San Francisco. I was 25 years old then, in my first job. No real responsibilities. Each weekend, I would go hiking in one of the many parks in the east bay. A favourite was a place called “Garin Ranch,” which is just above neighbouring Hayward. It’s a series of easy, relatively flat trails in the foothills.

I remember that it was getting later in the afternoon, and was cool. Maybe 50 degrees. It was getting towards sunset and dusk.

From the trail in Garin Ranch, you can see the San Francisco Bay below, and on the other side, the cities of the Peninsula and the Santa Cruz Mountains.

It was a crystal clear day, and the sun had just begun to set behind the mountains. I stopped to watch as the sun touched the mountains, and then gradually sank behind them. I had never really watched the sun go down, and I was amazed that you could actually see it sinking, slowly from view. Over about 45 seconds, it descended, and then was gone, leaving “golden hour” light.

For the first time in my life, I saw the sun set, and it was an awesome, magical feeling.

That feeling was a time I really, truly felt alive.

Now, it’s obviously not constant, because I have to think back to that day. But the feeling has now lasted nearly 30 years.

That Was a Great Day

I'm a baseball fan, and have been about as far back as I can remember. Growing up, I have many life memories that in one way or another attach to the game. Long, languid summers playing pickup ball in a furloughed school yard. Listening to the Blue Jay games on static from a radio station in Leamington, Ontario. Going to the games with friends.

The 2023 is winding down, and recently, I was asked a question that is variant of one I suppose every fan thinks of from time to time.

In your memories of baseball, what was a great day.

It's subtly different from "what was a great game." I of course can think of many great games - some wins, some losses.

But great "days?" That's something different.

Two great days come to mind when I think a bit. Bookends, of sorts.

They were not “great” in the sense that something huge happened on the field. No heroic performance by a player, no season-changing outcome. There was no perfect game, or four home run performance. The San Diego Chicken did not make its debut nor was anything of historical import done.

For me, they were “great,” though.

In mid July 1978, as a young kid, we were visiting my grandparents in Cleveland, Ohio. My parents took us downtown to see a game at the old Cleveland Municipal Stadium.

I had never been to a professional baseball game before, but having just the year before begun playing, I was really excited.

The old stadium was one of those huge, horse-shoe shaped fields with a giant main concourse underneath. I remember emerging from the tunnel to see the brilliant sky and green grass. The smell of vendors hawking popcorn and hot dogs.

I can clearly remember the loudspeakers playing a 1970s, easy listening song, “Summer Breeze” (no; really), by Seals and Crofts.

The opponent that day was the Kansas City Royals, in their powder blue road uniforms. As part of the festivities, children were allowed onto the field to have our photos taken with one of the Cleveland players (in those days, the Indians). Eight year old me chose Horace Speed, who was the starting centre fielder that year.

As a souvenir, I asked for a pennant and a plastic batting helmet. Being from Toronto, I was a Blue Jays fan (the Jays had just begun play a year before), so my parents got me a Blue Jay helmet. I remember going back to my grandparents’ house that day after the game was over, and pretending to be a big leaguer, racing around imaginary bases with my helmet on.

Over the subsequent years, I’ve been to many hundreds of games, but my first is probably my favourite.

On the other end of the spectrum, in 1994, now 24 years old and in my final year of grad school, I went back to Cleveland, where my parents had settled. This time, to see my father. It was June, a week after school ended.

I went this time with my father to the new Cleveland Stadium - called Jacobs Field at first. It had opened that same year, and was brand new. Just my father and I went, reliving an experience and memory nearly twenty years past.

It was not the same, of course. I was not a wild-eyed eight year old. We couldn’t go on the field, and everything was on a more human scale - the field was still as green and the sky as blue. The game and the dimensions had not changed, but I had.

I was in Cleveland because my father had been diagnosed with lung cancer.

Going to Jacobs Field in June 1994, the day before I came back to San Francisco to start my first job, was the last day I got to spend with my father when he was alive.

The games themselves were not great, and in fact, I don’t even remember who won.

There Is No Going Back

 

Yesterday, my family and I went to see what is likely to be the final Indiana Jones movie, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.

It's not a bad ending for the franchise - plenty of action. Some one-liners. Nice cameos for Jonathan Rhys-Davies (Salla) and Karen Allen (Marian). 

The vehicle, both literally and figuratively, is a device that actually does exist, the Antikythera mechanism, which was discovered for real in a shipwreck found in 1901. Now, the device is unlikely to have actually been constructed by Archimedes, but many consider it the first real computer. It could not do what the movie implied, but it was obviously way, way ahead of its time. 

I have written a fair amount about technology - how it changes life, what the pitfalls as well as benefits for humanity are. Mainly, I think what tech does is enhance what we are capable of rather than changing our nature. With the rise of so-called "AI," and most notably and recently, Chat GPT, I was thinking about how the current young people cannot imagine a world without some of the inventions that are now more prosaic. Mobile telephones. Tablets. The internet.

As Gen-Xer, I would start by pointing out that the AI and the internet are technologies, much like others. And they obviously have had and will have a profound impact on life.

But are these changes more significant than others. More than, say, the automobile? The telephone?

My wife, son, and I during COVID began watching the television show Downton Abbey, and in Season 1, the manor house gets its first telephone. Everyone is mesmerized by it, save for the dowager mother of Lord Grantham, who views it with cynicism and suspicion.

The younger servants in the house (e.g., Thomas) could be said to be the “last generation to experience what life was like before the telephone.”

Every invention that came before us, to our conscious minds has always been there. My grandfather was born in 1908, so for him, although the airplanes became a routine device, it had not always been around, and it surely was not ubiquitous.

I can remember when I was first exposed to a computer (in 1981, an Apple II+). I clearly remember my first modem (a Hayes 300 baud device that you put the telephone receiver to, circa 1983). I can clearly remember trying to send documents via email using uuencode and uudecode. Then Stuffit, then WinZIP that did everything automatically. Then you could just drag and drop files into an email.

The internet has, more than any other of these inventions, had a massive impact on culture. My son is 16, and he simply cannot imagine the world without it. The idea of going to a library, sorting through a card catalog, getting books, and doing research that way is as odd to him as would be using a telegraph to me. Hell, he has never seen a real encyclopaedia, or had the thrill of waiting for the “update” that came every year in an extra volume to augment the now out-of-date information.

Almost everything he needs or wants to know, he can get in minutes from a tiny device that’s the size of an old Texas Instruments led calculator that I used to use.

That puts information at his disposal that 16 year old me could not dream of.

On the other hand, it also means less human connection. “Relationships” are often virtual. Friends are icons on a screen. I got a glimpse of this in graduate school, where one night, two people waiting for their simulations to converge (I got my degree in mathematics) were using a live chat whilst sitting at their SUN work stations.

They were sitting in the same room.

I thought it odd, and dysfunctional at the time. I couldn’t imagine things like WeChat or twitter then.

So something gained, and something lost.

We gain information, we lose human connection.

In short, it’s a Faustian bargain. Like all technology is. It’s up to us to use it wisely.

And finally, I do not accept the premise that it will never be the same again. The Romans at one point had engineering and technology that along the way got lost. It took humanity in some case centuries to learn back what was known.

It would be incredibly hubristic to think that we cannot fall to the same situation as they did.

Live Fast

At a recent awards show, former pop idol Madonna drew some fairly unkind comments about her battle with aging - a fight we all face in one way or another - and how badly her obvious plastic surgery had turned out. 

People often think of celebrities, and often, it appears as thinly-veiled jealousy. They're rich. They have lifestyles that appear glamourous and easy. Few people say "no." My own life is comfortable if not glamourous. I have complaints of course, but in the grand scheme of things, there are few things that I really want that are out of reach. Most of those are not really worth having, to be honest. 

So I am not envious of celebrities. 

But the comments about Madonna and subsequent arguments in social media made me think. One in particular popped up - "What celebrity, in your opinion, has aged the worst?" Almost all the responses focused on people who either got fat, lost their hair, had bad plastic surgery, or some combination of the lot.

I do not have the money and apparent carefree lifestyle of a Hollywood star. On the other hand, as I get older, and look older, no-one cares. I am not going to wind up on the cover of a tabloid being photographed in sweat pants walking out of an AM/PM.

And thus, my answer is likely different compared to others. And it is this.

Rather than engage in a discussion of people who once looked great but now as they have gotten older do not look so good anymore, or posting “shocking” pictures of a 55 year old woman without makeup, I would say that when it comes to aging “poorly,” nothing can top not aging at all.

The celebrity who aged “the worst” in my opinion is River Phoenix, who if he were alive, would be the same age as I am. We were both born in 1970.

Phoenix ran out of tomorrows in 1993. He was 23 years old.

I have no idea how River Phoenix would look today if he were alive. But ultimately, Madonna is alive and River Phoenix isn't. And that counts for something.

We should feel grateful that we are given today and not regret that we looked better at some point in the past.

People, if they are lucky, age. None of us - not you, not me - look better at 50 than we did at 25. It’s just that simple.

88 MPH at 45 RPM

I am a kid of the 1980s, though in truth, I am no more a "kid," as birthday 53 is looming just over the horizon. I still remember when, in the words of kitsch pop group "Bowling for Soup," MTV still played music.

Since Bruce Springsteen, Madonna
Way before Nirvana
There was U2 and Blondie
And music still on MTV
Her two kids in high school
They tell her that she's uncool
'Cause she's still preoccupied
With 19, 19

1985

At that time, there was a throw-away line from an old Van Halen song that said something to the effect that, every day, your life is growing shorter while your memories are growing longer. Of course, it's undeniably true. Time is relentless. It is unforgiving.

Read last night as I was heading off to sleep that another former high school mate has left us behind. Death comes for us all. It just comes for some too soon.

One thing that today offers that yesterday did not was the ability to summon music on command. Spotify, YouTube, and even (a bit earlier), Napster allows us to curate playlists that, 40 years ago, we had to patiently create by placing cassette tapes into clunky tape decks, await our favourite songs to be selected, and then wait for the deejay to end his "talk up" to press, simultaneously, the PLAY and red RECORD buttons.

Going back generations, writers of science fiction have talked of time machines. HG Wells. Stephen Spielberg made a time machine, famously, out of a DeLorean car in 1985.

Time machines, of a sort, in essence already exist. They exist in sound. 

Maybe I am alone in thinking this, but I find that certain songs, more than any other medium, have the ability to take us, instantly, to a specific moment in time. On New Year's Eve, we were counting down with ABC, and Duran Duran were one of the guests. Hearing Simon Le Bon sing "Hungry Like the Wolf" immediately took me back to walking home from seventh grade, stack of books under my hand, with my Sony Walkman and foam headphones. As a young adult, "Bittersweet Symphony" or Marcy Playground conjure up an image of the day I moved into my first house. Even weirdly enough, the Seals and Croft song "Summer Breeze," which was on the recorded track at Cleveland Municipal Stadium for between innings, reminds me of the first time I ever saw a professional baseball game in the cavernous, and now gone, stadium. I can smell the fresh grass and hot dogs when it appears.

Now that I have Spotify, I can put on a playlist from 1982, 1995, or even 2005 (when my son was born), and I do not need 1.21 gigawatts. 

No plutonium needed.

Eventually, We Are All Microserfs

 

In exactly two weeks, we in the USA will go to the polls for the "mid-term elections." Which is to say, an election held in between presidential tilts - the middle of the current incumbent's term. There has always been something of a generational split in US politics, but (with the exception of the 1960s), never has one been so noisome is the current millennial versus baby boomer ruction.

I was recently on an airplane flying for business, and had a couple of hours to kill, so, flipping through the movies selection, I happened across a now nearly 30-year old film called Reality Bites. 

This movie, starring a young Ethan Hawke, Winona Rider, and Ben Stiller (who actually, it turns out, also directed) depicts the lives of a group of recent college graduates in Houston, Texas. The lot (Stiller aside) struggles with the move into "real" adulthood.

The release date was early in 1994, which makes the characters just about my age at the time. 

I thought of Reality Bites as I was reading the back and forth between millennials (themselves now moving into middle age) and their nemesis generation - which of course, are the baby boomers.

The whole fight skipped my generation, the Generation Xers.

One particular commenter snidely asked if baby boomers get "upset" because the national focus has moved from them onto millennials (again, hello from my cohort).  

I got to thinking - is this true? Is it actually the case that “boomers” (baby boomers) get upset when someone (presumably, not a baby boomer) when it’s pointed out that advertisers prefer the 25–54 demographic? 

My parents are baby boomers, as are their friends. More than one of my colleagues is as well.

I’ve not seen this happen, even once.

I am a sample size of one, and of course, it is not really anything more than the observations of one person.

I was born in 1970, which makes me solidly part of Generation X.

I watch the “OK boomer” versus the “snowflake millennial” civil war with a certain amount of bemusement.

I was 21 years old in 1991 when the writer Douglas Coupland published his book Generation X, which is where the name of my cohort comes from. A year later, he published a companion called Microserfs.

I am a mathematician; I was at graduate school when my sister, an English major in college at the time, and now an English teacher, sent copies to me to read. This was before Kindle or other e-readers, so we read actual, physical books in those days.

When Reality Bites was released, my cohort was the target of advertisers. Movies -  like Reality Bites - that played heavily on stereotypes were targeted at us. We were the new workers whom our elders were struggling to understand. We lived in our parents’ basements and were refusing to grow up. We had economic and social challenges, but the things that we decided were “cool” defined the culture.

You know what? I went to bed one night, and the next day, I was the focus of an article in the Wall Street Journal about what older workers were needing.

Here is the ugly truth: the world moves on. Your time is temporary. At some point, there will be a younger generation that is going to be the apple of Madison Avenue’s eye; it will also be the target of scorn for sociologists and writers at the Wall Street Journal.

I think that as much as baby boomers do get “upset,” and I think this is seriously overstated, it’s more to the reality that nobody likes to face the truth that your time on earth is going to end, and that life is going to go on even after you don’t.

Advertisers are just hip to this before the Angel of Death is.

Downfall of the Once Great

A couple of weeks ago, I had the chance to stop over and visit my mother and family back east as I returned home from a business trip. Got me to thinking about a question I was asked a few years ago -

"What was the downfall of the 'popular' kid in your high school?"

I've now been out of high school for 34 years; my own son will be graduating in June next year. So this was -and remains - an interesting question

My own honest, lived experience is this: for almost all of us, life is not like it is portrayed in television or movies. There is no tragic downfall. The cool, arrogant jock almost never gets any sort of cosmic retribution. The neglected, quiet kid does not triumph. My life was not screen-written by John Hughes, as I suspect yours wasn't.

For the most part, life just….goes on.

I went to a pretty run-of-the-mill high school. It was good, but not outstanding academically. A kid two years ahead of me - Class of 1986 - was the first from my school to be accepted into Harvard in 16 years. The only student as far as I know ever accepted into Princeton was a Westinghouse Science winner. By comparison, my son's high school, a public school here in San Francisco, had three graduates last year accepted to Harvard, and two to Princeton.

Athletically, it was a suburban school of less than 1000 students, so most of the sports teams were mediocre to poor. We weren’t a wealthy community, and we were not one destined to be showcased in a “feel good” movie starring some pretty young white woman and edgy, urban black guy.

I am guessing that most of you could probably relate to this. 

Because of this, our “popular” kids were probably pretty unremarkable.

The most popular kid in my class was, unsurprisingly, a football player. Probably the best in our school, and so he was good. But he wasn’t good enough to get any sort of college scholarship.

The ‘cool group’ were largely made up of athletes who stood out among their peers but again, if the teams won as many games as they lost, it was a ‘good year.’

I graduated first in my class, so I guess I was in the ‘bookworm’ group. I had a small group of friends. Most of us looked at the in-group with some admixture of envy, jealousy, and if I am being perfectly, absolutely honest, a whiff of self-righteous disdain.

For those who ruled the roost, there was no “downfall” to speak of. 

They ran the school until June 1988. Some went off to college. Some went straight to work. The ‘cool guy jock’ joined the Navy. I went away to school back east (Dartmouth), and aside from visiting my parents and family for Christmas, went back only once - to attend a friend’s wedding. My father died 25 years ago; my mother sold our family home 10 years ago and moved back home to Canada. I doubt that I’ll ever return.

There was a television show on, maybe 25 years ago, called “The Wonder Years.” It focused on the adolescent life of a kid named Kevin Arnold, set on a street that looked for all intents and purposes exactly like the one I lived on as a little kid in Garden Grove, California. Garden Grove is a relentlessly middle-class suburb in Orange County, about an hour south of Los Angeles.

Kevin’s life was not terribly unfamiliar to me. Few remarkable things ever happened. In one of the episodes, the narrator (played, I think, by Daniel Stern) observed that, in junior high, who you are is dictated by who sits next to you at lunch.

(As an odd aside, when I was a grad student, I had Fred Savage (who played Kevin Arnold) as an undergrad in one of my sections at Stanford.)

In one episode, an odd girl with three pigtails befriends Kevin. Kevin was desperate always to move up to the cool lunch table, and was off-put by the oddball’s attempts to be friends. He shuns her, and by the end of the episode, she moves away. At the close of the show, in his epilogue Kevin remarks that "no-one remembers much about the kids you were so desperate to impress as a kid.”

The reality is that almost none of us is destined for any sort of conventional “greatness.” We are destined to live the more or less “average” life. There are some triumphs. There are some failures. I personally do not consider it a ‘downfall’ that the BMOC ended up in a typical, middle-class job.

Thanks to Facebook, I found out that the jock who sat at the top of the cool table, after a stint in the Navy, turned out as an adult to be a pretty solid, nice, and empathetic guy who spends his time when not working helping needy people. It’s not what I would have imagined from a guy who I thought I had pegged as a 16 year old with a cocky attitude and a big mouth.

What he does now impresses me a lot more than his exploits on the football field or in the halls of my high school.

John Lennon once said that life is what happens when you’re making plans. Jobs. Families. Bills. Kids. Weddings. Funerals.

You Were Made as Well as We Could Make You

 

My sister last night (my time - she is three time zones ahead) posted an image in social media. One I haven't seen in quite a while. It's an analog photo that had been scanned in, a bit yellowing now with age. It's a photo of my father, in his Navy uniform, holding my baby brother James, outside our then home in suburban Los Angeles. Garden Grove, California to be more precise.

I don't know if the photo was taken the day that my mother and father brought my sister and brother home from the hospital, but it's plainly in the very early days of their lives. (My brother and sister are twins).

Today is my father's birthday. He would have been 80 years old this year. But of course, dad lost his battle to cancer many years ago. This summer, it will be 27 years in fact.

Looking at that photo, I see a baby whose entire life remains, and I see my father, who was then a young man. Much younger than I am now. At the time, nobody knew, nobody could know, what life had in store for my brother, my sister, or my dad. That's the bargain. 

One of my very earliest memories was the day that my parents returned from hospital with my brother and sister. I can recall pretty clearly them being absent in the final days before the twins were born, and the excitement of the day that all came home. I remember the anticipation and happiness of getting the chance to hold them - sitting in a chair; I was three and a half then. I have an older brother, 11 months my senior, so until that day, I was the youngest. Charles and I each got a chance to hold our new siblings. To meet them and welcome them to the house. 

Now, from time to time, I think of that day. The memory seems pretty clear, perhaps too clear in my mind. So at this point, I cannot say how much of the image I can recall is real, and how much of it has been constructed over time. A shadow, re-enforced by suggestion and by my own imagination. In the film Blade Runner, the replicants (artificial humans) are given "memories" of events that did not happen. But to the replicants, they are as real as they could be, and I guess, help define their humanity for them.

As time is passing, the distance between when dad was alive and here and today grows longer. 27 years is not so long ago for me now. Time has a way of shaping our view of the past, and I suspect, softens the hard light that shines around the things we would rather not see. God has given us in the way we remember the past a precious gift that is more powerful than an airbrush. More of what constitutes our brief time on earth becomes photographs and memories all the time.

I think about my father a bit every day. A bit more so on his birthday. A bit more on the anniversary of the day he left us behind here. I thought he was an old man, as I suspect, every kid thinks about their parents. I am now about two years on the south side of the age he was when he died. I don't feel like an old man, although I sometimes do not recognize the face that now looks back at me in the mirror. 

I've said it before, but human beings are not machine-made. Real things risk imperfections. We are made as well as we could be, but we break. We age. Ultimately, we leave behind photographs and memories and stories.

All too often, we measure our lives by what we've done. My father was a surgeon. Part of his job was fixing imperfections of people when they fell and were broken. A part of it was assuring that my brothers, sister, mother, and me had lives that were made as well as they could be. His life wasn't one that politicians talk about, or that get profiled in the newspaper. His alma mater will never name a building after him. 

Dad wasn't a 'great' man. But he was a good one. 

A critical lesson that I did not know then, but I think I grasp now, that I have my own son who is just a couple of years removed from becoming an adult, is that what is truly valuable in living is not the toys you accumulate or the pictures of vacations that you take. It's not the house you live in or cars you drive. 

I've reached some level of success in life. I've had the chance to see the world, made a good career. People offer congratulations.

But the truth is this:

Much of what I have been able to do is because of the things my parents couldn't. Their sacrifices were my opportunities. The things I got to see were the places they missed. 

Now that I am decidedly on the back nine, that's how I hope my life measures when I am a photograph in a book. My own son will have his own life. He'll make his own choices, and ultimately, measure out his happiness and success by the yardsticks he decides. My hope is that when he is my age, he will look at how I spent my life and my time the way that I look at my old man, who didn't get the chance to get "old." 

If I can measure to half of that tally, that's a life that I can defend as great in a meaningful and not platitudinous way. 

80 years old. 

Happy birthday, dad. Thanks for how you invested your life in your family. In me.

I miss you a lot.