Nobody asked me, but … (#5)
Today is an ordinary day. Weather-wise, it’s the perfect time of year to be in Florida, with sunny skies, comfortable temperatures, low humidity, and, as my wife pointed out this afternoon, no mosquitoes (yet). Work-wise, nothing extreme is going on … Jeff is teaching a training class, Steve and Pete are working on technical aspects of APPX that are beyond my understanding, and I’m blogging (again). I don’t expect today to be a milestone day in any regard, except that I’ll use today to talk about milestones, turning points in life, forks in the road that lead you one way or the other, but never back.
Some of life’s turning points are obvious - weddings, arrival of children, job changes. But some stand out less, if at all, and one recognizes their significance only through hindsight. These can be small events, casual encounters, incidental moments whose impact may not be realized for years. I’ll share a couple of those from my life.
It was my choice where I went to college. But the college chose the dorm in which I would spend my freshman year, and when I arrived on campus in August 1969, about the only thing I knew about my dorm was that it was the ONLY all male dorm on campus. (There was one all female dorm, and all the rest - 15 or 20 at least - were co-ed. Rotten luck, right?) The first person that I met in my dorm was not a roommate, but rather another guy on the floor, an incoming freshman like myself, probably just as lost and naive, and perhaps also cursing his luck at having no girls around. Andy became a good friend, and several years later, we actually became roommates for a while. One day in 1978, his responsibilities as a school guidance counselor had him chaperoning a cookout at a local park, and he invited me to go with him. I met another chaperone at that event, who also worked at the school, and she and I have now been married for 28 years.
My first job out of college was as a salesman for a wholesale food distributor. I had to call on restaurants, sandwich shops, hospitals, and other places that served food, and try to convince them that our food was better than what our competitors offered. I didn’t last long in that job, but one of my customers was the owner of a sandwich shop, who subsequently opened a couple of other similar establishments, and then branched into retail sporting goods. In his office, he always had a day-by-day calendar on the wall, with each Tuesday imprinted with the phrase, “Rotary Today”. Bob was the person who first made me aware of the worldwide service organization, Rotary International. In 1979, shortly after moving to Syracuse, the branch manager of our local bank invited me to go with him to his Rotary meeting. Bob had created enough awareness that I answered affirmatively, and Jeff brought me as his guest to that week’s meeting of the Rotary Club of Eastwood (Syracuse). I was invited to join a few weeks later, and Rotary has been a very important part of my life ever since.
Twists and turns are part of everyone’s experience. I can look back and see how one job led to the next, one acquaintance to others, or how one experience steered me toward the passion that’s dominated my interest for almost 20 years now, Rotary’s Youth Exchange program. But when you try to trace these things back to their beginnings, to where the tines come together on the fork, you can’t help but wonder what would life have been like had another path been chosen, another option selected, or a different coincidence encountered somewhere along the way.
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