San Francisco Sunday

In my boyhood, summertime brought lots of these puffy, creamy cumulus clouds to Michigan's skies. Like most kids, I played lots of imagination games with those clouds, divining shapes and making up stories. I didn't know it at the time, but one of my very few true talents in life would be as a story-teller.



Back then, I could not really envision myself as an adult. Unlike other kids, like my sister Kathy, who knew she would grow up to be a sailboat, my attempts to peer into the future only left hazy images and vague shadows. My fate was indecipherable, perhaps because I had no coherent role models.



My father worked in an office, the only man among women, responsible for handling the numbers for his company, the Borden/SaniSeal/McDonald's milk companies over the years. Earlier, he'd been a factory worker in a foundery, a paint company, and Fisher Body (GM).

Now that I think about it, I am a "numbers guy" for my current company, not handling the books but creating data points for Predictify's "From the Crowd." But, my life has been nothing like my Dad's, just as I suppose, my children's lives do not much resemble mine.



Sometimes, as I watch from the sidelines at their sports events, or the audience at their performances, or just across the dinner table at my children (all of them), I am stunned by their beauty, intelligence, sensitivity, and creativity. I imagine all parents are like this.



Mine is a mind born to ramble. I never seem able to focus on one topic for long, just as I couldn't conjure being an adult because no clear image ever entered my mind.



I'll probably join AARP this week. Now I qualify as an elderly man, my main feeling is one of surprise. I think my illness at 12, followed my other one at 24, pretty much removed the idea of a long life from my expectation list.



There are certain numbers I hate, and I suspected I would die on one of them -- at 35 or 46. But somehow, I've outlived my superstitions, and there is no bad number left for me. I guess all of this passion, happiness, sadness, success and failure, memory and anticipation is really just gravy for me.



I'm one of the very lucky ones. This old and still full of stories, even as I feel physical fraility encroaching in its inevitable manner. Now it is not the future that grows hazy but the past. Who was that boy gazing up at clouds, not knowing who he would turn out to be?

And where did he go?