Introduction
Hey, how’s everybody doing?
I’m pretty good. This month I’ll be celebrating my 50th birthday. People have often told me that I look younger than I am, and I’ve tried to look at that as a compliment.
The truth is that I don’t feel old. I’ve been 49 for almost a complete year but I just felt the same aches and pains that I felt when I was 48 or 45. Or, at least according to what I remember, because one thing that seems to be going is my memory. And, the older I’ve gotten, more time has gotten compressed somehow. I mean, I know that it’s 2024, but to me 2017 feels like it was just yesterday.
The one thing that makes me feel old is really how much older everything else in the world has gotten. For example, Google is 26 years old, having been started in 1998. That means I’ve known a world before Google existed and I’ve probably used the service since it was just a teeny tiny, baby start up.
My daughter turns 24 this month, and I’m still getting used to the idea that she’s an adult now. My son, Josh, was born two years after she was, so he would be an adult now too if he was alive. Our youngest son is 11. In each of their cases there were times when it felt like they would be babies forever, and then all of the sudden they got big. Maybe it seems this way because my wife and I were so busy raising them and taking them where they needed to be. Combine parenthood with work, and it can be a lot to juggle.
Birthday Traditions
As an adult, my 50th birthday feels very much like a milestone. I’ve learned the hard way that not everybody gets that much time on Earth. My evidence consists of all of the people who have passed away at much younger ages, including my son. It’s easy to just gripe about getting older, but when you think about your chances of making it this far it’s actually a real blessing.
The tradition of celebrating birthdays is a funny one because you spend the first few years learning about what it’s all about. Babies and toddlers must be taught what to do by their parents. “Yes, dear that’s a smash cake…you can smash into it” and “Go ahead, you can rip the paper.” I can’t imagine that these were things which my parents told me, given how the rest of my childhood went. As far as unwrapping gifts go, I’m in my late forties and it still takes effort to shred wrapping paper when I’m opening up gifts.
But, kids are encouraged to look at their birthday as being a fun day just for them. No parent would casually tell their five year old, “Thank goodness you’re still with us,” or say “Here’s hoping you make it to year 6,” like they’re taking bets.
I certainly felt like my birthday should be a special day, to the extent that I might wake up on the 24th of September feeling strangely improved somehow, much like Peter Parker after he was bitten by a radioactive spider in those movies. Alas, most birthdays felt just like any other regular day, except that at some point there would be presents for me to open up, a cake, and maybe a party with my family and friends.
Birthday gifts, though, were Da Bomb. I mean, there were other holidays where everybody exchanged gifts with everybody else, like Christmas, but a birthday was the day when the only stack of wrapped gifts had my name on them.
Memorable Birthday
One birthday which stands out in my mind was the year when I received my first computer. Now, you all might be thinking, hey a computer! That must have blown your mind! Well, let me tell you how it went down.
So, it was September 24, 1988. And a Saturday. I spent the better part of the day at my Grandpa Cornell’s farm. It took me about 40 minutes to get there because I rode my bike.
While I was there, I helped to grade apples while mentioning that it was my birthday about 700 times. This was a process by which the apples which were picked in my grandfather’s orchards were sorted based on size using a machine with this giant converter belt. The apples would roll down onto a platform with different sized holes in it which would let the smaller apples fall through as they passed along. The smaller apples were sold to the local cider mill to turn into cider. The larger apples were sold for eating or baking pies.
My role that day was to watch the apples and remove any that had scars or holes in them, things the machine couldn’t detect. And, I don’t remember much more about that except that this is where I was.
Afterwards, I pedaled back home. I feel like we probably had something special planned, probably a dinner, but at that point I was too old for a party. And relatives stopped giving gifts once we passed a certain age.
The time came for me to open my gifts, and this year I received one that was a whopper—the computer. My mom told me after I opened it that she and my dad had decided to get it for me after I spent so much time using her manual typewriter to write stories. They felt like I needed something more powerful.
Best Computer Ever
The wrapped gift itself was about the size of one of those economy sized refrigerators, you know the kind students bring with them when they move into the dorms. When I opened it, I discovered that I had been given—oh, boy!—a TRS-80 Radio Shack Model III MicroComputer!
Not only was this sucker huge, but it ran using two floppy disk drives and a monochrome display. I don’t quite remember how much RAM it had, but I recall that it was measured in kilobytes. It also weighed a ton, so once you picked a good spot for it, you were unlikely to move it again.
We plugged it in, I inserted a 5 ¼ inch floppy disk with DOS on it into the boot drive, and then turned it on. It whirred to life, and then showed us a prompt, a little like from those sci-fi movies like “Alien” where the characters interact with a computer via a keyboard.
Except, I already somewhat knew what to do. I loaded BASIC and then began to enter in commands that I had learned in the 4th grade. They were:
10 Print “hello”
20 Goto 10
Yes, with that little bit of wizardry, you actually could command a computer to display exactly the words you wanted it to display on the screen, as opposed to just sitting there with a blank screen. I had learned how to code in BASIC back in the fourth grade during our “computer time.” Normally, our computer time consisted of playing video games on Texas Instrument computers which had been set up inside a room which was just slightly bigger than a closet. It was lots of fun playing Space Rocks, Munch Man, or Burger Time, so you can imagine my dismay when our game playing was pre-empted one day by a lesson on what BASIC was, and how to make it do stuff for us.
Something must have sunk in, because it stayed with me long enough to deploy my very dangerous, 4th grade level computer programming skills in stores like Kmart which would sometimes put PC’s out on display for shoppers to try out and, if you knew what you were doing, you could command it to do things like print “Kmart sucks!” over and over again on the screen. Ah, good times.
Well, now I had my own computer which I could command to repeatedly display lines. But, it was not yet better than my mom’s typewriter because it did not have the program it needed which would allow me to compose stories.
But, as far as birthday gifts go, this computer was pretty impressive. It might have been more impressive had I gotten it back in 1980 when it was originally released, but given I was only 5 that year I can understand why they held off. It also helped that they had gotten it used.
I never minded one bit that my new computer was eight years out of date. Later, I would end up checking out books from the local library which contained sample programs for BASIC, and entering in programs that replicated a banking ATM or guided me through a Choose Your Own Adventure story on the computer. I spent hours reversing these programs and turning them into something completely different. Once, I figured out how to generate ASCII art on the computer, scrolling it across the screen, and I would pretend to shoot at the pictures with a toy laser gun. This was just a slice of what life was like before the Internet, kids. I would also write programs which would generate bar graphs and other images which were simliar to the kinds you might see on the starship Enterprise, from Star Trek.
My TRS-80 would also help facilitate my first kiss. My girl friend at the time and I were hanging out one day, and I was showing her how the computer worked when we started to write messages to each other, a little like text messaging. I asked her if I could kiss her, and she said “sure.” So I did. Later, I printed off our conversation and annotated where the kiss happened.
Eventually, I would get a wordprocessor that worked on the computer, and I relied on it up until my senior year in college when I replaced it with a different computer that ran Windows 3.1. I have owned many computers over the years, but none have been as impactful as that very first one that I recieved for my birthday. It was my gateway drug into computer technology, and once I got started I was seriuosly hooked. Later, what I learned about BASIC would help me to understand how to build a page by hand using HTML. Most of all, because my computer wasn’t the latest-and-greatest, I was required to use a lot of ingenuity and creativity when trying to figure out how to do things with it.
Conclusion
Looking back, maybe my birthdays have been more important than I realized. Because I can’t help but wonder if I would be where I am today if things had gone differently on Saturday, September 24, 1988.
Maybe as we grow older, we gain wisdom which allows us to reflect on our experiences in a new light. As Indiana Jones said once, “It’s not the years, honey. It’s the mileage.” I’m grateful for my 50 trips around the sun, and I’m looking forward to at least one more.
