John Bay – 50th Reunion Essay

John Bay

10506 S Dunmoor Dr

Silver Spring, MD 20901

dunmoor@verizon.net

Spouse(s): Constance Y. Li (1995)

Child(ren): Nolan G. Bay (1999); Nora L. Bay (2001)

College: Timothy Dwight

I don’t like telling people where I went to college. I don’t lie about it, but I don’t volunteer the information either. If I’m asked by a stranger, I fear that the answer will give rise to exaggerated expectations. If I’m asked by someone who knows me, I dread the look I’ll get. They try to hide it, but they always betray it in some subtle way. It’s the look that says: “Him? Yale?”

After graduation I went on to study math at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. As fate would have it, one of my Yale math professors, the late Jon Barwise ’63, had accepted a position at UW that fall. It should give you some idea of the deep impression I had made on my professors at Yale when I report that Barwise’s first words on encountering me in Madison were, “Where do I know you from?”

Emerging six short years later, a thesis short of a PhD but with some marketable computer skills, I finally entered the working world. My subsequent career was pretty mundane in general, but the work I did was always useful, or so I like to tell myself. Most of it was in federal contracting, for NASA and other agencies.

I started a family rather late (married in 1995, kids in 1999 and 2001). I found parenthood intensely rewarding in the early years, intensely frustrating later on.

Yale has changed since 1969, for the better in most respects I think. Coeducation, of course. The renaming issues have been handled well, and the almost insanely high application-to-acceptance ratio may be slightly ameliorated by the new colleges, whose sole architectural virtue seems to be that they tend to draw attention to some perhaps hitherto unappreciated merits of nearby structures. Kline Biology Tower never looked so good. Yale in our day was an ideal environment for a somewhat accomplished musician like me with no professional aspirations, and I can only hope that this kind of opportunity still exists.

The experience of aging has revealed the answers to several questions that had always puzzled me. For one thing, we walk that way because it hurts to walk any other way. For another, we tend to take a dim view of the way the world is changing because it makes the prospect of missing out on the future less terrible. Even taking that into account, though, it seems that for our generation, our inevitable personal disintegration is being mirrored by the disintegration of institutions, of the physical environment, and even of the concept of objective truth. A prime challenge for those who follow us will be the avoidance of despair. Given humankind’s long experience with this emotion, you’d think we’d know something about how to deal with it. I’ve always felt that sheer silliness was underrated in this regard, and so I’d say that in these troubled times each of us should be asking himself, “Am I certain I own enough plastic spiders?”