Kerrying On

When my partners and I first organized our company nearly thirty years ago, we were surprised by the stance our employees took on snacks. That’s right, snacks. The day we opened the doors of our burgeoning consultancy, we decided to stock the communal refrigerator with tasty fruits and juices.

In the spring of 1964, as I approached my eighteenth birthday, my dad concocted a harebrained scheme (is there any other kind?) to help save money. His plan was to take advantage of our family’s health insurance by having me undergo medical procedures that our carrier would stop paying for—the day I turned eighteen.

For almost ten hours, I had been waiting to shoot a video clip that, one day, would become one of my favorites. Our production team had started early that morning by taping an example of how to get a meeting back on course.

I suppose that the Christmas traditions we cling to the most as an adult are the ones we enjoyed the most as children. This means that for some people, pine trees covered with lead-foil tinsel are a must. For others, if the family wassail doesn’t contain fresh pineapple juice, why, it’s simply unacceptable.

In the spring of 1952, Lydia, a woman who lived up the hill from our house, purchased the neighborhood’s first power lawn mower. Had the circus marched up 25th street while P. T. Barnum himself juggled flaming chainsaws, it would have drawn less attention.

As a boy growing up in the 50s and 60s, I faced threats from all sorts of juvenile delinquents, “hoods,” and other shifty teenagers we now call bullies. Modern experts suggest that mid-century hoodlums were unhappy with their lives and consequently determined to bring a balance to the universe.

On December first, 1969, my wife and I sat glued to the radio. What event had us so interested? The reading of calendar dates. The radio announcer who had our attention was drawing pill-shaped capsules from a large, glass vessel.

Now that I’m retired and have time on my hands, I’ve decided to work on something I’ve been avoiding for years—old photos. I’m going to sift through dozens of shoe boxes, envelopes, and albums, and not only organize the photos contained therein, but also scan the pictures as a means of transforming them into digital files.

After a fifty-year absence in my life, a word that once filled me with fear and loathing found its way back into my world. It arrived one day, quite by accident, when my granddaughter Kylee was talking to her sister Kelsee about a classmate.

The other day, as I drove my fourteen-year-old grandson, Nate, to a local theater-in-the-round to watch a live performance of To Kill a Mockingbird, he stopped texting a friend for just long enough to learn that not only had I seen the play before, but I had also read the book and watched the movie.

Gifts come in all shapes, types, and sizes. Some arrive with the sounds and excitement of the holiday season and some do not. Some are beautifully packaged while others aren’t bundled at all because they’re completely intangible.

In the early 1980s, I slowly transitioned from teaching MBA classes to designing corporate training programs. Surprisingly, with this change in focus, my design partners and I soon found ourselves in, of all places, Hollywood—not the glamorous version that produces dazzling movies, but the not-so-glamorous version that produces industrial videos.

When I was a little tyke, I loved insects. Sometimes I’d watch ants for hours as they hauled Lilliputian bundles down footprint valleys and up tennis-shoe mountains.

As a child, my parents fiercely protected me. At their insistence, I remained close to home and under their tight watch. And then, one day in early 1959, they let go.

When I was twelve years old and William “Pop” Noonan first invited me operate his corner grocery store while he spent his Saturdays running errands, I quickly accepted the job—and then repeatedly botched it. I took so many missteps, I’m sure he would have fired me were it not for the fact that he was my grandfather.

One day, during a particularly boring stretch at church, I leaned back and noticed, for the first time, the laminated beams supporting the chapel’s roof. The beams reminded me of my summer job after my freshman year of college when I worked at a plant that made (any guesses?) laminated beams.

In the fall of 1952, my mom carefully dressed me in my yellow raingear, kissed me on the cheek, and sent me down the long road that would take me to Larrabee Elementary School. There, far from Mother’s focused tutelage, my first year of grade school unfolded at a pace that was so unbearably slow, I feared I would burst into flames out of utter frustration. At home, things moved along nicely. At school, we spent three days studying the letter A. It was if the very fabric of time had been altered.

“You know what I’d like for dessert tonight?” I asked my mother one morning as I hovered over a bowl of cereal. “Does it look like I’m taking orders?” Mom replied with a smile. I was twelve at the time, so I wasn’t completely blind to social graces. I knew that it wasn’t polite to demand a favorite dessert and now I suspected that treating Mom like a waitress taking orders was tactless as well. But I really wanted something special.

Yesterday, my grandson Tommy asked his mom (our daughter Christine) if later that day he could watch a TV show that was probably more suited to his older brother than it was to him. Undecided, Christine replied, “Maybe,” and returned to making lasagna. A few minutes passed before Christine felt a pull on her sleeve—it was Tommy. Smiling brightly, he made the same request.

Nowadays, teenage boys have it made. Most have access to man caves and media rooms that serve as perfect hangouts. When I was thirteen, you had to leave home to find anything remotely similar. In my case, a hundred yards down the alley behind our house, nestled against the local college’s northern boundary, lay a hamburger joint called Gus’s. It sold cheap, greasy food that nobody actually liked.