You don’t have to read all of this. Working through the notions here for my own edification. But it is relevant to yesterday’s post.
The MOVE Bombing anniversary is a big deal in my world, so I’ll ask you to bear with me today for some big picture speculation that will pass harmlessly away in a few days, as it sometimes does.
I don’t know what par is, but I’ve seen my share of celebrities, often by sheer accident, a few times by design. I sneaked into the Hasty Pudding before I became a member to see Jimmy Stewart when he was their Man of the Year. Wanted to see the Hollywood superstar who had roomed with a cousin -once-removed of mine at Mercersburg and Princeton. I didn’t try to speak to him. Too shy and out of my comfort zone in the Hasty Pudding’s second floor bar. I also saw Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, and Muhammed Ali, and Frank Sinatra in person because I wanted to, and actually shook hands with Goldwater. When I became a member of the Pudding I saw other celebrities because they were being honored, including Jack Lemmon, Gloria Steinem, Julia Child, and a couple others I suppose.
Bunch of rock concerts were intentional obviously (five times for the Rolling Stones is clearly no accident), but quite a few were purest happenstance. Had to attend a Knicks game at MSQ with a client and saw Tony Bennett sing the anthem before the game. Cool. Interviewed by the same Customs agent as the BeeGee’s at Miami International Airport when I had $10,000 cash in my cowboy boot, long hair, and a just concluded weekend trip to the Bahamas for “Pleasure,” not “Business.” The band got waved through. I had to answer questions for 15 minutes in the Baggage Reclaim. At the airport in Nashville one time, I realized I was walking in the same hurried stride, side by side with Jimmy Dean the country singer and sausage mogul. Typically, pretended not to recognize him, though I still remember had no earlobes an all. Creepy looking. Stood in line behind Dom DeLuise in the cafeteria at NCR WHQ, where I was an employee and he was the new company spokesman in TV ads. Fatter in person somehow. Sports coincidences too. Pete Retzlaff the Eagles star on a Metroliner coming home from school, Joe Kapp staring a road rage incident in Harvard Square, Bud Collins the PBS voice of televised tennis before the alphabet networks cared. Never said a word to any of them, even though Collins was sitting right next to me on a one-hour flight from Philly to Boston. I always figured if I were a celebrity, I wouldn’t want strangers monopolizing my time in confined spaces or restaurants. Considered a promising young tennis player by the pro at my parents’ country club, I got picked to be a ball boy for an exhibition match between Chuck McKinley and Vic Seixas. I didn’t bother them either. Thanked them for the privilege and never even asked for an autograph.
Life’s travelers brushing one another in passing. That’s a common occurrence for a lot of people and I don’t make a habit of reading much into it. Why the odd coincidence of seeing Isaac Asimov a couple feet away through my taxicab window the day I sold The Boomer Bible always stuck in my mind as a self-deprecating anecdote about youthful hopes. An omen, I thought at the time. I’m going to sell millions of books and the universe just gave me a hint to that effect. Wrong, of course. But funny in retrospect.
Until recently. Old age changes perspective about milestones past. What was important and what wasn’t tends to shift around when you know more about how things turned out afterward. How I started to realize that the me I am now wouldn’t be anything like me if certain things hadn’t happened exactly when they did, with absolutely no planning by me. You’ve already seen (I hope) my post here about the French Hurry-up, which not only got me on a ship that erased fear from my life but also got me back to America just in time for the Kennedy assassination and witnessing the murder of Oswald on live TV. Life changing. The schooling hurry-up got me to Mercersburg just in time to witness the arrival of the drug tsunami and the Chapel Walkout that made me a closeup reporter on what the hell was going on in my generation. My Extra issue of the Mercersburg News was pulled off from soup to nuts by a 15-yr old kid. The same hurry-up saved me from being drafted at 18 (I got maybe the last II-S deferment because I was already enrolled by the time I had to register; I politely reminded them of that when they classified me as I-A, and they agreed by return mail.) I wasn’t trying to dodge the draft — went ahead and graduated when I could have kept the deferment for a fourth year in college, which made me I-A again, subject to the lottery, where my number made me a dead-cert to be drafted. But that was the year they drafted no one and put an end to conscription.
It goes on. A chance meeting that turned into mentorship finally derailed the hopes of my family and friends that I would accept my fate and go to law school like a good boy. A swaggering Okie pillar of a man named Harold Gunn saw me as more than a babysitting job foisted on him by my boss and his business partner, Santo Salvo, and put me through a quick but rigorous apprenticeship in the world of work where calluses and backbone matter more than the gift of gab. He made me by turns a lumber-yardhand, a truck driver, and a collection agent, while sharing his confidences about what and who was wrong with the old family business he was trying to save. He was also steering me away from lawbooks toward graduate business school because, he told his sister in my hearing, “underneath the baby fat, he’s a gut puncher.”
B-school was where the abundant holes in my math and science background got filled in, including enough accounting courses to put me in danger of becoming a CPA. It also took more than a year and a half to get an MBA, which seemed to be the new attention span of my post-college life. I thought I was more or less drinking and absenteeing myself out of business school to avoid becoming a Big 8 accountant. I didn’t realize that the real deadline was getting back home in time to be sitting with my mother in the den at lunch watching Dick Cavett the day he had Julian Jaynes on as a guest for the full hour. That was more of a life-changer than the MBA would have been. Now I’m 21 years old with a brand new creative impetus it will take me years to grow into.
And then — not because everybody was pissed off and disappointed with me, including me — I had to quit drinking and move to Philadelphia just in time to encounter the punk rockers of South Street AND get my feet wet in real world applications of computer technology in something called the microprocessor revolution. Why I wound up with an incredibly premature vision of Artificial Intelligence as an aid to writing by groups of people engaged in producing a single work. What happened after that I’ve described elsewhere, but particularly in light of the emergence of Artificial Intelligence as a potentially huge civilizational variable, I can’t help wondering about seeing Asimov up close in 1991…
There’s one more category of meeting I’ve heard described as a real phenomenon. The sages say you meet someone early in life who will become unexpectedly important in your life some significant number of years down the road. I know of two who meet that criterion in my own life. When I was in my first year at college, I went with some dorm acquaintances to a bar down Mass Ave toward Central Square, near B.U. and MIT. Typical college bar, lots of kids, pretty girls, and bartenders who weren’t too concerned about asking for ID. Why we’d gone there. There was a bartender there who was obviously the one in charge (what was that Tom Cruise movie glamorizing the type…?). He looked like a 20-something jock, white tee shirt showing off a powerful upper body, red hair, and a red beret. He was friendly, gregarious, and a good bartender to boot. Quick to catch a hail, quick to fill an order, and well worth the best tip a 17-yr old kid could bear to part with. Never saw him or that bar again in my college years, but I didn’t forget him. I’ve seen a lot of bartenders in my day, but I couldn’t describe any of them for you now.
Cut to 17 years later. I’m working directly with top rank NCR executives to find bidders for an RFP I had written to do innovative research on user needs in the office information systems market. I had one bidder I’d picked myself, Edward Yourdon, one that was a done deal because they’d been the strategic consultant for my dying division (I know…), but I had worked with the SRI honcho who’d write their proposal, so it wasn’t a total loss, and the execs wanted a reliable name from the consulting world they were more familiar with for the third bidder. They picked Coopers & Lybrand, who won their spot on the list in their initial meeting with us, three full partners in blue suits, and a polished presentation that impressed everyone, even me. I had also recognized one of the partners as the Central Square bartender from all those years before. Older, grayer, not quite so fit. His name was Mark Long. I have written about him here before. Coopers won the bid, I resigned from the company soon after, and by then Mark and I had exchanged phone numbers to let each other know of any opportunities that might enable us to collaborate profitably..
We ultimately became partners in a new firm . Two of the partners from the NCR project and I formed Laird Long & Sylvester specifically for the purpose of looking big for General Motors, where there was a lot of business to go after. Mark taught me how to be a Big 8 professional consultant. He was a fine friend who passed away in his early fifties. I’m proud to have known him.
The other instance of meeting someone in youth who reenters and changes your life many years later was my wife. Pat was my boss at Stone & Webster Engineering Corporation, where she was the Assistant Supervisor of Word Processing for a sizeable force of IBM ATMS typists and a slightly smaller troupe of Proofreaders assigned in multiple locations around the company’s Pennsauken campus. We became fast friends on the phone, she assigned me the job of writing a course on commas that finalized my education as a professional writer, and we broke off our friendship short of romantic consummation because I was leaving to take my next comeback step at a company she recommended I use for my ladder to a real career. We didn’t see or communicate with one another for 22 years. In a slough of despond and just drunk enough, I called her out of the blue late one night when I was caring my mother’s last days and we got together soon after. Been together ever since. Just celebrated our 20th wedding anniversary.
Obviously it happens. Maybe the universe giving you a hint that the past is never gone, and a reminder that maybe you will meet some of the same people later on, so treat everyone right.
That doesn’t explain Asimov on a rainy street in NYC. He will not be a player in my future life and work. Yet he is responsible more than perhaps any other thinker for raising the knotty issues surrounding the use of computers to do the work of human beings. He’s the robot man. He’s the one who posed the questions about the possibility/plausibility of building moral compasses into machines. Consciousness has been my subject since Julian Jaynes on the Cavett show. AI has been on my mind since I designed the Prose Upgrade & Narrative Collation (PUNC) distributed writing system for my punk writers.
Seeing him on that day in 1991 doesn’t seem entirely coincidental anymore. I’m not thinking of it as a glitch in the context of “universe as computer system” as the movie is suggesting. I’m thinking of it as glitch in the obsolete postulate of the universe as a random, impersonal system. Asimov was a nod in my direction, not a promise of famous and wealth, but a tiny proof that the meaning is there in all directions and it is indeed personal.
No comments:
Post a Comment