Today is my 79th birthday and all I can say is "It happens!" I have also heard "Time flies while you're having fun," and I have had some great years and some not so great years.
I have been poor, rich and between. Rich is better, but it amounts to a more fashionable set of problems. Having been there I know what it means. If I were rich today I would own a sailboat and an airplane, both eating lots of money, requiring many phone calls and meetings with people I probably should not trust, but have to, perhaps with my life.
I have had some unspeakable tragedies; I will not speak of them. I missed military service, and there lies a story. I have put it all in a memoir entitled "A Long Way From Normal" meant to be of value to young men coming of age, going into education, the arts, broadcasting, business, entrepreneurship and CIA subcontracting. It will be published in about a year.
My first recollection is of throwing up on my grandmother on Christmas Eve, 1936. I was six months old and she had picked me up abruptly. I needed burping, being full of mother's milk. She was wearing a dark purple dress dotted with bright Paisley patterns looking like eyes. I thought we were under attack by a tribe of invaders. I later realized this is the mechanism of stage fright and never had it after that.
My first realization of where I was came December 7, 1941 with Pearl Harbor. It crystallized my world in one day. My music teacher father had the best radio in town, wanting to hear big band remotes and operas. It had short wave I learned to tune, catching the afternoon BBC broadcast to hear Vera Lynn sing "We'll Meet Again," her signature song not realizing she was a teenager at the time and is alive today!
My RKO dancer mother had international dancer friends who visited us as there were few hotels and they were traveling the RKO theater circuit doing shows. How many little kids ever tasted Truffles, Caviar or Saffron, but then watched their mothers send what little we had in fine groceries to her friends abroad. The big favorite was peanut butter! Our couch always had someone on it. It was war time for my childhood until ten in a very different place, time and people. It was war, but it was right in every respect but SPAM! How I learned to dislike that stuff!
It troubles me that everything we had then, and much more, is here now and we cannot manage it. You can make a case for our not having managed very well then, but that is all the more reason to wonder why we have not learned to by now. I am hopeful that we will and so I say it is a happy birthday.
Adrian Vance
I have had some unspeakable tragedies; I will not speak of them. I missed military service, and there lies a story. I have put it all in a memoir entitled "A Long Way From Normal" meant to be of value to young men coming of age, going into education, the arts, broadcasting, business, entrepreneurship and CIA subcontracting. It will be published in about a year.
My first recollection is of throwing up on my grandmother on Christmas Eve, 1936. I was six months old and she had picked me up abruptly. I needed burping, being full of mother's milk. She was wearing a dark purple dress dotted with bright Paisley patterns looking like eyes. I thought we were under attack by a tribe of invaders. I later realized this is the mechanism of stage fright and never had it after that.
My first realization of where I was came December 7, 1941 with Pearl Harbor. It crystallized my world in one day. My music teacher father had the best radio in town, wanting to hear big band remotes and operas. It had short wave I learned to tune, catching the afternoon BBC broadcast to hear Vera Lynn sing "We'll Meet Again," her signature song not realizing she was a teenager at the time and is alive today!
My RKO dancer mother had international dancer friends who visited us as there were few hotels and they were traveling the RKO theater circuit doing shows. How many little kids ever tasted Truffles, Caviar or Saffron, but then watched their mothers send what little we had in fine groceries to her friends abroad. The big favorite was peanut butter! Our couch always had someone on it. It was war time for my childhood until ten in a very different place, time and people. It was war, but it was right in every respect but SPAM! How I learned to dislike that stuff!
It troubles me that everything we had then, and much more, is here now and we cannot manage it. You can make a case for our not having managed very well then, but that is all the more reason to wonder why we have not learned to by now. I am hopeful that we will and so I say it is a happy birthday.
Adrian Vance
No comments:
Post a Comment
Please comment and make suggestions.