What have been some of your life's greatest surprises?

My earliest memory of a great surprise was my grandfather Maurice Otto taking me to Arby’s on Salem Avenue.  There may have been my Mom or another sibling or two there, but all I remember was the gigantic Arby’s sign shaped like a cowboy hat and how amazingly delicious the roast beef sandwich tasted.  Not that my family ate out a lot or favored fast food, but I knew enough to be shocked at the taste.  It’s still my favorite fast food sandwich to this day.

My first trip to the Hawaiian island of Maui was full of the beautiful ocean and mountain scenery I was expecting, but the shocker was the awesome aromas of the resort.  I remember walking out of the hotel room the first morning and experiencing the fragrance of bananas wafting through the air.  Everywhere I went whatever tropical fruit trees were planted imparted their essences into the air.  Nowhere else I’ve ever been has matched that aromatic scenery. 

I walked into yet another Information Technology Leadership Team meeting in the summer of 2001 and I was the last one to join.  The buzz in the room was unusually busy and my colleagues began asking me what I thought.  “Thought of what?”, I replied.  “The merger, of course”, they explained, not really explaining anything.  I was the last one on the team to learn that Mead and Westvaco were merging and I was dumbfounded, my safe little world all of the sudden filled with questions and unknowns.  That began a crazy seventeen-year stretch of changing companies and managers that, in the end, worked out very well for me.  

The Oktoberfest in Munich, Germany was a bucket list item we knocked off the list in 2011.  We did the usual combination of a two-hour nap after arriving at the hotel after the overnight flight, followed by a walk, dinner, and back to bed for a long night’s sleep at 8 pm.  Waking up refreshed and settled into the GMT+2 hour time zone, we headed to the train station to take the short trip to Oktoberfest.  We knew we needed to exit at “Theresienwiese", but did not have further directions.  We just figured we follow the crowd, many dressed in traditional lederhosen or dirndl dresses, but as we exited the escalator we were shocked to see we were already inside Oktoberfest, the beer tents, rides, food vendors, and shops right in front of us.  It took a few minutes to soak it in before we set off exploring.

When I retired in August of 2018, the folks in the office gave me a nice send-off and I was focused on my life’s next journey, one not filled with alarm clocks and deadlines.  My wife scheduled a little retirement party a few weeks later and drove me blindfolded to the destination, which turned out to be Jimmy’s Ladder 11.  Maybe that should have tipped me off that something was going on, but when they walked me up to the second-floor party room, I was truly shocked, to the point of tears, to see so many of the people I worked with over the years there to greet me and wish me a happy retirement.

We hold an annual summer party, inviting around two dozen people for a late afternoon cookout, their favorite beverages, and conversation well into the darkness.  I was deep in conversation with friends during the 2021 party when my daughter Laurie and her husband Rodney, now residents of Charlotte, North Carolina, walked over to me.  I looked up, and while I certainly recognized them, my brain initially rejected what I was obviously seeing, seizing up for a couple of seconds before realizing they had made the seven-hour trip to surprise me.  And an absolutely wonderful surprise it was!


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Tell me your favorite story about Moses

Moses was the perfect cat.  He was loving, at least to humans, and everyone adored him.  I would take him to appointments at the vet and he would walk down the check-in desk where all the staff would pet him to his delight and there’s.  He never weighed more than eight pounds even though I kept his food dish full all the time.  He ate when he was hungry or when I opened his favorite treat, a can of tuna fish.   Moses was also a fierce hunter.  When I moved into a new apartment, he spent the first couple of days getting rid of every ant and spider he could find.  He could easily jump six feet in the air and I once saw him clear a six-foot fence with graceful ease as some neighborhood dog gave a fruitless chase.  He only had claws on his rear feet, but that combined with his teeth were more than enough to take out his prey.  Combined with remarkable see-in-the-dark abilities, he would routinely disappear for hours and that leads to my favo...
Read more

Share some early memories of your son, Michael

Mike was raised by his grandparents in Pennsylvania until he was school age, so unfortunately I don’t have infant or toddler memories to share.  But from the time I first met him, and still true today, the thing that springs to mind is that he is a happy guy.  As he grew up he developed into a very extroverted, out-going child, loving to ride bikes around the neighborhood with a pack of friends, attend ice cream socials at school, and strapping on skates for organized events at Skateworld of Kettering.  We lived a quarter-mile from Indian Riffle Park and he loved the swings, monkey bars, teeter-totters, and merry-go-rounds. Mike is a very determined person.  When he decided that he wanted to lose weight back in grade school, he controlled his diet, including eating cans and cans of tuna fish, to shed pounds until he was rail thin.  Then he decided to begin lifting weights and went after that with a passion, putting on solid muscle and eventually benching over th...
Read more

What things are you proudest of in your life?

I’ve written about some of the things I’ve built during my career while answering some previous questions but after forty-four years of dabbling in Information Technology, I accumulated more than a few.   One of my favorite sayings is “I’m glad I never learned I couldn’t do something” and the stories below begin with a pair of projects I undertook at Wright State University that few others would have even contemplated trying, followed by two situations where technical ability had nothing to do with achieving significant changes and finishing up with how I helped resolve a dispute without knowing anything about the subject being discussed. GOTHIC was a mainframe assembler program that read a single input card and printed out, sideways, each character using multiple lines of asterisks, creating large letters in a Gothic-looking font. Since the mainframe printers used continuous forms, GOTHIC was perfect for creating large fancy banners, many feet long, announcing birthdays or ot...
Read more