My grandmother started walking five miles a day when she was sixty. She’s ninety-seven now, and we don’t know where the hell she is. ~ Ellen Degeneres

A Wanderer Looks at Sixty

The title is obviously stolen from one of my all-time favorite songs, A Pirate Looks at Forty by Jimmy Buffett, while I’m no Parrot Head, the song absolutely touches my soul.  It so perfectly expresses nostalgia for something that actually never happened to you.  For those of us who tend toward being dreamers and wanderers this is not an uncommon piece of our reality.  I am turning sixty, I’m within six months of going into retirement or at least what passes for retirement these days.  I seem to be screaming up on a significant nexus point in my life and it has me very much in a contemplative mood.  I’ve certainly been looking back, dreaming about what has and could have been, while planning and dreaming about what’s possible and next.

Part 1 – Where I came from

I was born in Hudson, NY a dying industrial town that exploded in population in the 50’s and 60’s with the great migration and then suffered the same fate as most rust belt towns.  The factories closed and the jobs dried up and people who used to have little education but good jobs, were not in such a great place.  I grew up under policies of urban development and the explosion of divorce in America.  I went from being one of two kids with a divorced parent in third grade to a whole lot of my friends having divorced parents in high school. 

I didn’t grow up well off, I guess what you would call it is working class.  My single mom worked a lot, so I had a lot of responsibility early, I also spent a lot of time on the street.  In school as a kid I had the perfect cover for a juvenile delinquent, I got straight “A’s”.  This meant anytime someone needed to be blamed for something that happened, things I often did, the blame didn’t go to the white kid with good grades, it got blamed on the white kid with bad grades or the black kid.  I learned about privilege early, I also learned about how to game the system.  One of the greatest skills I learned in a rough neighborhood was how to read people.  You see, you needed to be a wise-ass, it was required.  You had to cut hard with your tongue and at times be able to back it up with your fists.  But in hard places there are damaged people, even as kids.  So you had to know how people would react to being cut.  Would they laugh, respect you or would they punch you in the face.  That made reading people a critical skill and that skill has served me incredibly well in the polite society I found myself in as an adult and in playing the bullshit games I’ve had to play in my career.  It also made me someone who is unwilling to suffer idiots, or give up my self-respect just because someone has a title.

I was also an angry kid.  Life wasn’t great, my family life was nuts, I didn’t live in the best of places.  I was small early on, excessively skinny and then later overweight.  I had crazy curly hair, I was very smart but not skilled socially.  I hadn’t yet learned to curb my verbal impulses, I tended toward brutal honesty and no one taught me about the expectations and niceties of life.  I will give a shout out to the first person who taught me a lot of this, including which fork to use.  She was my friend Peter’s mom, Mrs. Donatelli.  She was an incredibly sweet and kind woman.  She hadn’t come from money but her and her husband had done very well, she floated in upper society and she taught me a lot about the rules, and also about curbing my verbal impulses, all over glasses of Pepsi Light with slices of lemon.

My single goal growing up was to get the hell out of Hudson, NY.  It was a shit town, the people were small, the Peter Gabriel song Big Time, always reminds me of that town and my mindset at that time.  Time does change things and now Hudson, after its main street and a couple of other areas have been gentrified by New York City antique dealers, has become the darling small town destination for New Yorkers.  It gets written up in foo-foo magazines for being soooooo wonderful and you can’t get a hotel room for less than $200 a night and that room is a half-step above a Motel 6.

Being smart got me out, I was accepted to Eisenhower College with an automatic transfer in my junior year to the Rochester Institute of Technology as an Electrical Engineering major.  How that decision came about, well my high school counselor (my former peewee bowling and little league coach), said to me, “Mike, your dad works for the power company, you’re good at math and science, how about electrical engineering.  Sure George,” I responded and my career path was set.  Three weeks before I was to leave for this beautiful liberal arts college on the shores of Lake Ontario I got the one and only telegram of my life, Eisenhower College was closing.  I was going straight to RIT, stuffed into a triple in a dorm that also held a fraternity, Sigma Pi.

This is one of the biggest what if moments of my life.  I was never interested in engineering, had I started out at Eisenhower, I think there’s a real chance I would have found my way to my eventual college major in biology and ended up on a cleaner and accelerated path.  Instead, already angry about life, angry about being sent directly to RIT, stuck in a triple and taking classes that I didn’t like, Sigma Pi presented a great distraction.  Acceptance, friends, women, booze and drugs.

It would take me about 18 months to fully become a drunk, an addict, a whore and kicked out of college.  My parents at the time loved to blame the fraternity, Sigma Pi was just a vehicle to where I was heading.  I made some good friends there, got to know some good people, fell in love for the first time, had some insane and amazing adventures.  I also got exposed to music I would have never known about, it was in that fraternity that I learned about Genesis and Pink Floyd.  Even saw the movie, The Wall at the college theater high on LSD for my first time and the first screaming guitar chords literally made me scream and leap out of my seat causing my brothers to burst out laughing and falling out of their seats.  The National Technical Institute for the Deaf was also housed at RIT and so I got immersed in deaf culture, learned ASL and even dated a couple of deaf women.

Leaving RIT was a massive psychological tragedy for me.  It broke me, made me feel like a complete failure in life.  Returning home to my married for the second time parents was a nightmare of living with my father’s psychological abuse.  But also a massive joy to get to spend massive amounts of time with my toddler brother who was the absolute joy in my life.  Being a full-blown alcoholic and addict, living at home and working two jobs and going to school, my life was a black hole, and the best thing that ever happened to me.  I took that time to make the decision to get clean and sober, to dissect my life and decide who I really wanted to be, to get back to school and get my life on track.  I would transfer from Columbia-Greene Community College, a school that was insanely supportive of my recovery, to SUNY Plattsburgh.

My time at SUNY Plattsburgh was a revelation and glimpse of what my life could be.  I fell into amazing friends, got elected to student government and became a resident assistant.  I flourished, I did well in school, found my way to the correct major for me, a combination of Biology and Secondary Education.  I made life-long good friends.  I had become responsible, successful, was having a blast and really developing the self-confidence that I had learned to fake having at RIT.  SUNY Plattsburgh made me as a responsible adult and a professional.  I owe a large chunk of that to a woman named Cheryl Hogle seeing that potential in me, and she did that for so any people at that college.

I spent two years in Kentucky at Eastern Kentucky University to get my master’s degree.  A happy accident really, I went there because they had an Ecology program, because my granny was a hillbilly from that part of the world and because it didn’t snow in Kentucky, well pretty rarely anyway.  I stumbled into the brightest and best group of graduate students that program had ever had.  I made great friends and learned a lot about field biology and ecology.  Eastern Kentucky University was also loaded with the most beautiful women you’ve ever seen, per capita likely the most beautiful college campus in America.  And seemingly Tennessee shipped all of their pretty women their as well.  I was teaching, learning amazing things, doing awesome research and had a great group of friends, it was a magical time.  Instead of doing what I likely should have done and taken a full ride to Virginia Tech to continue my research, I took a left turn to answer a voice in my head that said I’d be a great lawyer and went to law school.

Law school was a complete disaster, put me massively in debt and after one year I walked away.  I expected to find a bunch of really intellectual folks studying law, instead it was a bunch of dumb ass business majors who were getting a law degree because it was a good degree to have.  But it did bring me to California and Sacramento and gave me a taste of the place I would end up living for half of my life now.

After law school I worked for three years at a consulting firm doing fisheries related work with projects in the South Pacific and Africa.  It was an interesting job, got me to Hawaii, taught me a ton about tuna, sushi and black pearls and gave me a huge taste for international travel.  I left to go to Tennessee to do a PhD in ecology following those lines and it was another disaster.  Eight years, no degree, a lot more debt and living in the bible belt certainly had its drawbacks.  However, I spent time in Brazil in the Amazon, learned to speak Portuguese, got fully back into teaching and met the love of my life, who married another man on my birthday, welcome to the complete lack of straight lines in my life.

I left Tennessee and returned to California, to the Monterey area, a place I’d fallen in love with my first time in California.  I worked at Hartnell College with the best students I ever worked with, had tremendous success and started my career as an administrator.  That career would take me to Sacramento (twice), Placer County, the Mojave Desert and finally to the San Francisco Bay.

And in the blink of an eye it’s twenty years later, I’m closing in on retirement, and in my career I’ve become a very different administrator.  I was always the innovator, the program developer, the guy who brought in money and pushed the institution forward for the benefit of students.  But now, on the back end of this career, I’m the old man on the mountain.  I’ve become the person people come to career advice, for how to solve problems and most importantly to cut through the bullshit and politics to find out what is really going on.

The one thing that has stayed consistent is that I’m the person who won’t just sit there and let shit happen, who always speaks up when I think something is wrong and am always willing to ask the uncomfortable question that is on everyone else’s mind.  So I’m both a complete pain in the ass to my bosses and one of their most valuable assets.  Sometimes they see that, sometimes they don’t.

Coming Soon

Part 2 – The Eye of the Nexus

Part 3 – What the Hell is Next?