Looking Back

Gee, I guess it’s all down to gosh darn luck. And that Yale degree, of course. But, looking back over my life, in all honesty I am so happy to report that the entire ride has been relentlessly wonderful.

Although it didn’t start off that way. After all, I guess that I was one of Inky Clark’s attempts at diversity. Because no one from my high school in Nondescript, Ohio, had ever even dared to step across the county line before. And even though I had been both valedictorian and captain of the football team, the truth was that there were only seven students in my graduating class, and we only played two man touch. What’s more, not only didn’t we have any AP courses, but we had just finished learning how to diagram sentences.

So it was really easy being intimidated by those swaggering preppies from Andover and Exeter. They—and everyone else for that matter—were all bigger and stronger and smarter and richer and better looking than I was. Nor did my Freshman classes help my ego one bit, either. Well, I suppose I probably shouldn’t have signed up for both Sanskrit and Malayalam. Although the trudge up Science Hill for those 4 AM Saturday Chem Labs, now that was compulsory.

Speaking of compulsory, what was the point of the Phys. Ed. requirement that we pogo stick backwards around the entire outside perimeter of the Old Campus? Does anyone else remember that?

Anyway, by the end of Freshman year I was using three syllable words and I realized that I did fit in. In fact, I got along so well with my roommates—Dirk, Biff, and Bipp—that we continued to share a quad up through Senior year. What’s more, we’ve maintained our connection during the intervening decades. And even though Biff passed away in 1997, I still talk to him regularly through a Ouija board.

But you probably want to know about my career after Yale. Well, right after graduation, with Vietnam staring me in the face, I took a job teaching special needs Peace Corps trainees as a conscientious objector. After that it was back to school for a joint MBA/MD/JD/PhD in Medieval Studies. When I graduated with that degree in 1983, however, it turned out that there was little demand for this specialty. So, trying my hand at running my own business, I started one at my kitchen table. The idea: Making kitchen tables that convert to work stations for people starting businesses. Within ten years I had hundreds of employees. And in 2004 I sold out to Omnicorp Octopus International.

Since then I have kept busy by traveling, hiking, reading, bicycling, excavating ancient Mongolian tombs, and inventing and patenting a perpetual motion machine.

But enough about me. What’s really important is family. And I’ve been extremely fortunate in having a wife who not only has never argued with me, but has never once had a thought that was even slightly different from mine. The rock that holds me steady, Mitsy is a terrific cook, a published poet, a tenured professor, and a winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. And my kids? Kirsten (‘96 JE) (Isn’t it great that Yale is finally Co-ed!) is a street mime, a serial entrepreneur, and an orthopedic surgeon in San Francisco. And Damien (‘00 TD) has already become a Managing Director at the Trilateral Commission which secretly runs the world.

So, all in all, it has been a truly charmed life that has exceeded all of my wildest dreams. Although naturally I can’t take the slightest credit for any of my success. After all, every single bit of it is somehow magically connected to those four years which I spent at a certain college in New Haven, Connecticut.

And who cares if this essay is over 500 words? Because when all is said and done I’m still a friggin’ Yalie, dammit! So deal with it world.