You know a lot of us have seen a lot of things in our lifetime and I for one have enjoyed every single thing that I have seen or done or been a part of in this great big wonderful world of ours. When I came into this world in 1956 it was a simpler time for most folks who were just trying to make a living and have a family. I remember it as if it were yesterday, getting up eating some little something for breakfast and blasting through the front door to find my bicycle and see who was out there waiting for a great big adventure in the neighborhood that we called home. I don't think any of us were rich by any means but we all had our bicycles and various toys and especially our imaginations to power today's great adventure or even sometimes just relaxing in the woods behind our homes and eat a few green apples and talk about all the great accomplishments that we were going to be a part of in the future.
You and I both know that we probably weren’t responsible for any great achievement ourselves, but I do know however we made an impact on this world and I personally think that we made a good impact on it. Who knows one of our future ancestors may find a cure for cancer or have the knowledge to stop global warming. The possibilities are endless just because we were here and a part of this wonderful world.
I have seen communication and information that most people would've never had access to become available at our fingertips 24 hours a day. I have seen knowledge become commonplace on something called the Internet, I wonder if we had mentioned something like that to any of our friends about something this mind-boggling in 1961, they would have thought what planet had we fallen to earth from. Yes it would have been considered ludicrous to even think of such a thing let alone computers being so commonplace that every household would has at least two of them nowadays. Instead of having only one television per household there's almost one in every room and they're even connected to this wonderful thing called the Internet.
If you don't know how to fix something or need a recipe for tonight's dinner you don't have to go grab a book and start reading on how to repair it or how to prepare it, all you have to do is go to your computing device and entergoogle it on You Tube and there will be a video pop-up of someone enthusiastically telling you how to repair it or how to prepare it. If you can't remember what actor played in your favorite movie no problem just go to the Internet movie database and find out every single thing about that movie that could possibly be known to mortal man and in just a split second. You don't even have to be using your computer to find out this information you can do that on what we now call a smart phone. Believe me they look absolutely nothing like a telephone. The telephone in my day had a base a receiver and cord attached from the base to the receiver and even the base attached to the wall with a cord which was attached to a chord that ran to the telephone lines that ran all the way back to the main telephone station in our town and the smart phones which are better known as cell phones have absolutely no wires and you can still talk to someone in China and not be connected by a cord at all. I guess these things are all done by satellites and cell towers.
I even have something called a Roku box or stick that allows me to get over 3000 television stations and, at 60 years old, I find that completely overwhelming when, originally, our first television could only pick up two television stations and, I think, by 1960 we had the huge number of four television stations which included WKNO TV in Memphis Tennessee that signed own as Tennessee's first public television station outlet on June 25, 1956 from their studios at Memphis State University. Wow, that was the year I was born. So this June WKNO TV in Memphis Tennessee will be 60 years old this year, television has come a long way since then. I can remember the television sets having snow and ghosting pictures and really terrible reception, but not today, we have what they're calling either UHD or 4K television with dynamic picture range and all kinds of devices and they look so good you feel like you can almost walk right into the television screens.
I even remember that there were still passenger planes being flown out of Memphis's airport to far-off destinations that were using piston driven engines. I can remember as a kid going to the airport and sitting in the graveled area that was made for people to watch the planes coming in and landing and taking off and going to far-off destinations when the first of the jet engine aircraft for the airlines took to the air in 1959 and became popular in the airline industry of the 60's.
You see we grew up in an age where it was always changing from one day to the next you never knew what to expect. I even thought that the Jetsons' type automobiles would be flying around from house to house, from city to city, state to state and country to country by the time I turned 60 years old, but that hasn't happened yet. We are still driving around in these old piston driven engine automobiles wondering why aircraft have jet engines and we still are polluting the air with fossil fuel driving automobiles. I have to say though there is hope we're going back to the electric automobile. Yes, that's right, Thomas Alva Edison had an electric automobile back in the days of the model T and they just weren't popular and I have to tell you that they are not that popular today either, but with all the things that are going on with pollution and global warming we may have to learn to love the electric automobile. I just can't help it, until I can drive as far as I want to without having to stop for hours in between to let it charge back up I don't think I'll ever have one. You know I just thought of it, that my great-grandfather probably spouted almost the same words “until these tin Lizzie's can eat hay and make fertilizer don't think I'll have one”.
Don't want to make it seem like the world has gotten to be the Utopia that we thought it would be. Yes there are horrible things that happened today like mass shootings in schools and all kinds of other stupid stuff going on. I have to tell you that I have had a wonderful life my wife and I have traveled to exotic locations that I never thought I would ever get to see and that gives me one more thing to be so thankful about I really truly have met my soulmate. I want to tell you I never thought not one iota that love was more than just a state of mind or that anyone could be so perfect for another human being that they could call anyone their soulmate, but after 34 years of marriage I have to tell you and I mean it, I have found out what love truly is because I have found my soulmate in life. I would not want to do anything without her, go anywhere without her and, yes, I realize with such great love eventually will come great pain when we are no longer together. So you ask is it worth it or why would you go through that knowing what the outcome will be. All that I can tell you is that all that I am for all that I ever will be is because of the love and the patient's and the understanding of the woman that I am married to. Yes, it is worth it and I would go through it 1000 times more knowing that at the end either she or I will have great pain at the loss of our soulmate.
I just wanted to give you my impression of what a little tiny taste of what the 60 years have meant to me. Before I close I want to say something about my family life, my mother and father and my brother, none of them were perfect and some people might say that it was a dysfunctional family and that it was not an ideal environment to grow up in and I'm here to tell you, if you haven't walked a mile in my shoes and gone through the love and joy with all of the heartache and despair that I went through, the bullying and teasing, the taunting and having a loving mother wipe away your tears and a father who worked his fingers to the bone so that we could have more of the wonderful things that life had to offer than my mother and father had, then you don't have the right to think that. I always looked up to my older brother and for many years I thought he was perfect and, yes, nowadays we don't see anywhere near eye to eye on religion or politics or any of that kind of stuff as we did when we were kids, but he was then and is now one of my greatest heroes in life. So you see none of the bad things that happened to us as kids mattered, it was the love and the patience that my family had with an OCD and dyslexic child that made the difference from having a mediocre childhood to the absolutely fantastic loving childhood I had. I guess that's what I really wanted to say is that the first 60 years of my life have been wonderful thanks to the love of my family and the grace of God in my life “And A Little Help From My Friends”.
Happy Birthday to us!
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