Memories still abound from the last year I lived in Ohio

There are years from my childhood I hardly remember at all.

Then there's one I remember quite well. It was 1962, I was 12 years old and it was the last year before we left Ohio and moved to Virginia.

If there's one thing some people have and others don't, it's a sense of being from somewhere. I have a cousin who has lived his entire life -- nearly 63 years of it -- in the Columbus, Ohio, area. Then there's me. Starting with Ohio, I've lived in nine different states and one foreign country. There are three places I've spent at least 10 years -- Ohio, Virginia and California.

This was home in 1962.

It isn't always a question of how long. Sometimes years matter more at different times. I lived in Ohio for just 10 years, but they were 10 of the first 13 years of my life.

I lived in Los Angeles for 20 years, but they were from age 40 to 60. I think Ohio had a lot more effect on the type of person I became than anything in California.

In 1962 we were living in the house in the picture. My bedroom was upstairs at the left end at the back of the house.

The trees were a lot smaller then -- in fact, they had just been planted. We had been living in Huber Heights -- just north of Dayton -- since the summer of 1957. It was a nicer Levittown, a nice community where WWII and Korean War veterans were able to purchase homes and raise their families in America's largest community of all-brick homes.

I've written about Huber Heights before, and that's not the point of this piece. We moved into this house just before the end of 1961. My mother had her fifth child in October and seven people just wouldn't fit into the three-bedroom house we had been occupying.

The new house was 650 square feet bigger than the old one. My Dad was 36 and he must have been proud he was doing well enough to put his family into a home as beautiful as this.

It was the year John Glenn became the first American to orbit the Earth, the year after the nearby Cincinnati Reds had been to the World Series and lost.

In March, southwestern Ohio became the capital of college basketball. The University of Cincinnati won the NCAA championship by beating Ohio State. We lived about halfway between the two schools, an hour or so from each.

But even better to us, the University of Dayton capped off a 23-6 season by beating St. John's at Madison Square Garden and winning the National Invitation Tournament.

That was the year I really started loving basketball. I had played youth ball in fifth grade and shown absolutely no skill at all. I tried again late in 1962 in eighth grade and had pretty good dribbling, passing and defensive skills. But I played five or six games before we left for Virginia and for some reason, I never even attempted to shoot the ball.

It was a strange year. A local bully had singled me out for most of the last four years, and I had done a pretty good job of avoiding him. But walking home from school one day that fall, I turned a corner and found him standing there with one of his minions. He could have given me plenty of trouble by himself, but he had his buddy hold my arms behind my back while he punched me in the stomach a couple of times.

I was just 12 years old at the start of eighth grade and small for my age. I seem to recall that puberty came late for me, and I had the misfortune to run afoul of another bully that fall.  He was the biggest kid in school, 6-foot-3 in the eighth grade, and he wanted to take my place at the ping pong table. I told him no way and yanked the paddle back from him.

He told me I would be sorry. "I'm going to kill you," he said.

All of a sudden, moving to Virginia made sense.

But the last memory I have is of two milestones in television history that occurred within a few weeks of each other. One comes to mind because Donna Douglas just died. She didn't have a huge career as an actress, but she did play Elly May for nine seasons on "The Beverly Hillbillies."



That first episode showed us that we weren't going to see great comedy, but instead a show that was far more risque than anything previously on network television. We saw the voluptuous Elly May popping the buttons on her shirt, just the beginning of nine years of innuendo.

Four weeks later, President Kennedy spoke to the nation about Soviet missiles in Cuba. My parents both worked at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, which would have been a prime target. We had canned goods in the trunk of our car in case we had to evacuate.

Of course we didn't have to go, but I remember that fall so well, and as I age, it's nice to remember anything that far back.

With time raging along, a warning to get serious about health

Another year ...

If there is one thing certain about getting older, it's that nothing is certain. I turned 65 earlier this month, an age about which there is really no doubt. People can tell you 60 is the new 40 or other such platitudes, but 65 is one of those numbers that doesn't bend.

When you're 65, you're eligible for Medicare and just about every senior discount there is. Of course along with that, you are definitely a Senior Citizen.

Not that there's anything wrong with that.

It's the stuff that comes along with it that kills you. Stephen King's short story, "My Pretty Pony," has a grandfather on his deathbed telling his grandson about the flexibility of time.

When you're 7 years old, a summer can last forever. When you're 70, years seem to pass almost overnight.

Time goes from slowly meandering river when you're young to raging rapids when you're older.

This past weekend Nicole and I went to Jamaica for the second time in 13 months. Last year our granddaughter Madison was 5 and our grandson Lexington was 2.

Maddie, 6, with her cousin

This time they were 6 and 3, which if you think about it makes the last year 17 percent of Maddie's life and 33 percent of Lex's. Of course there is now a third one. Albanie Yvonne is two months old today, so the next year will be incredibly long for her -- nearly 100 percent of her life to date.

And from today till Dec. 31, 2015, God willing and the creek don't rise, will be roughly 1 1/2 percent of my life.

The days they pass ...

Of course, some days pass slower than others. Days of difficulties, of problems that seem insoluble, seem to last longer, and with Nicole diagnosed with truly serious medical problems, 2015 could turn out to be a very long year.

Lex, 3, and Albanie

I suppose it all comes down to attitude. The old "when life hands you lemons, make lemonade" saying certainly applies here. My only goal now is to make the most of whatever time we have left together. Nicole has been having physical problems in addition to her serious one, and starting tomorrow, she and I will both start a serious regimen of diet and exercise. We'll eat healthy and do some sort of workout every day.

I'm hopeful it means 2015 can be a better year for both of us.

It's sort of a last chance.

Time doesn't go on forever, at least not for individuals.

Wonderful memories live on even if they won't be remembered

Think about the very best memories of your life and the odds are that they will include early days with the person you wound up loving the most of all.

1992

I have wonderful memories from 1970 of the first serious girlfriend I ever had, and truly special ones from 1974 with the woman who became my first wife.

But the good times from 1970 didn't survive to the end of the year, and the first marriage was effectively over by the end of the decade.

The memories are still in there somewhere, although they have been tangled up with ones far less pleasant. There are other good ones from the '80s, although that may have been the most confusing of all decades to me. I lived in six different states between the beginning of 1980 and the end of 1989.

Everything changed for the better in September 1992 when I met Nicole. She was the smartest person I had ever met, although I do have one male friend who would disagree. She was a lovely woman, a wonderful mother of two and a world-renowned scientist in her field.

She never bragged about it, but sometimes something would slip through. She would show me something that looked totally incomprehensible to me and tell me that aside from her, only one or two people in the world understood it.

Fifty-one days after we met, we married. Everyone who knows me knows that number, but one you may not know is 8,037, as in today was the 8,037th day of our marriage.

It wasn't one of the better ones. For the last few months, Nicole has been undergoing medical tests to find out what's wrong. Today the neurologist confirmed what we had first heard a month or so ago. The love of my life, the smartest woman I have ever known, will slowly be losing her intellect and her memory and slipping into dementia.

She essentially has Lewy Body Dementia, also known as Dementia with Lewy Bodies. It shares symptoms with Alzheimer's, although LBD has some symptoms from Parkinson's, some hallucinations and some problems with REM sleep.

If there is one thing you cannot get in a situation like this, it's specific information. In fact, other than a brain biopsy -- which no one does -- we'll never know for sure if this is an exact diagnosis. We just know what will almost certainly happen.

It will be heartbreaking, although I will do everything in my power to make things more comfortable for her.

It isn't, as some people might say, the least I can do.

Sadly, it's the most I can do.

From 10 to one, the most amazing things I have seen in this world

What are the most amazing things you've ever seen?

I'm not the world traveler my wife, my children or my parents are, but I have traveled enough and been enough places to have seen more of the world than a vast majority of Americans. When it comes to countries, I have been to Canada, Great Britain, France, Monaco, Italy, Austria, Greece, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, China, South Korea and French Polynesia.

The list I came up with included four natural sights, five man-made sights that are very old and one modern man-made event.

In reverse order from 10 to 1:

Yosemite

10. YOSEMITE -- One of the loveliest natural views in the world and the greatest of America's national parks, Yosemite has something for everyone. I spent three days there in 2004 when my wife and I took her sister and her husband on a three-week trip around California.

We saw a lot of beautiful places, but our time at Yosemite was clearly the highlight of the trip. I'm hoping to get back someday and to be in good enough shape to do a lot more hiking.

9. 1997 LAUNCH OF CASSINI -- The only modern work of man on my list. My wife spent most of her career working for NASA at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and she put in 20 years working on the Cassini-Huygens Mission to explore Saturn and its satellites.

In October 1997, Nicole and I and our son Virgile -- 12 at the time -- went to Florida for the launch at Cape Canaveral. The manned launches of the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs in the 1960s, and while I watched them on television, it would have been wonderful to be there.

The best part of the Cassini launch was that it took place at 3 a.m. The nearest spectators were about 10 miles from the gentry, but as a reporter I was only three miles away. The thing that put this on my top 10 list was that when the rocket left the gantry, the  fire from its engine turned a pitch-dark sky into high noon. As the rocket climbed higher and higher, the sky grew brighter until all of a sudden the dark swooped back in and it was the middle of the night again.

Definitely an amazing sight.

From 50 years ago, a lot of songs still resonate in the present

In the last couple of years, the music companies have been doing some interesting things in trying to fight back against the dominance of online companies like iTunes.

One that strikes me is a package of "5 Classic Albums" on compact disc for about $20, all by the same group. An awful lot of people buy the greatest hits packages, but it's a lot of fun sometimes to hear the original albums as we heard them back then.

Yesterday I picked up five early Beach Boys albums, although "Pet Sounds" is only an early album based on the fact it was released 48 years ago. It was actually one of their last great albums during their heyday, but it's all a matter of perspective.

The album I really wanted was "All Summer Long," their second album from 1964, which in the pantheon is almost a greatest hits collection in itself.

The collection starts out with the group's first No. 1 hit, "I Get Around," which Music.com rates as the 15th most popular song of the year in its combination of U.S. and U.K. charts.

You may recall that 1964 was a big year for the Beatles, who held the third, sixth and seventh slots on the chart.

They might have done even better except for the fact that "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" topped the 1963 charts due to its December 1963 release date in England.

"All Summer Long" includes "Hushabye," "Little Honda," "Wendy" and "Girls on the Beach" as well as the title song made famous in the 1973 movie "American Graffiti." That's a lot of meat on one bone, and there are six other cuts that are pretty good.

As popular as the Beach Boys were, they actually didn't have that many songs that reached No. 1 -- three in the '60s and one much later. After "I Get Around," only "Help Me Rhonda" and "Good Vibrations" topped the chart in the '60s, and "Kokomo" did the same in 1988.



There's one thing very strange about the way music hangs around these days. Listening to music from 1964 in 2014 is almost the same as listening to music from 1914 in 1964. Of course there's one big difference. Advances in the quality of recordings were much greater from 1914 to 1964 than they have been in the years since.

Burr

Songs that were recorded in 1964 can be made to sound as if they were new last week, although there are very few recordings from 1914 that are even remembered. Someone named Henry Burr had three of the top 10 recordings of the year. Burr, a Canadian, was one of the most prolific recording artists of all time with more than 12,000 recordings to his credit.

His top recording in 1914, which was second behind a comedy recording called "Cohen on the Telephone," was "The Song that Stole My Heart Away," and recordings of it on YouTube are about what you would expect from a hundred year-old recording.

That's progress, I suppose. Still, there's no way I would sit around listening to music from 1914. If there is any irony in all of it, it's that as I've gotten older I have started listening to big-band music from the '30s and '40s, music I never cared for when I was young.

We all grow up, we all get older.

And as we do, if we're fortunate, we discover so many wonderful things we never knew when we were younger.

The evening a 72-year old man's energy put me to shame

Paul in Atlanta

"The long and winding road ..."

I didn't think I would ever see Paul McCartney in concert. When the Beatles stopped touring, I was only 16 and had never been to a concert.

In 1976, when Paul was coming to the Capital Centre in Landover, Md., in the "Wings Over America" tour, the date of the concert turned out to be the very day I had to put my first wife on a plane for the start of a two-year tour in Austria.

I was going two months later, but I wasn't about to suggest that I see McCartney without her.

We went to a lot of big concerts in the '70s. I saw the Rolling Stones, Chicago, the Beach Boys, Crosby Stills Nash & Young, Loggins and Messina, the Eagles, Billy Joel, Jimmy Buffett, ELO and others.

But never McCartney. The last arena concert I saw was Bruce Springsteen in 1984 in St. Louis, and the last big concert of any kind was in 1989, when I saw Ringo Starr and His All-Starr Band at the California State Fair in Sacramento.

I was about to turn 40, and I figured the rock concert part of my life was pretty well finished. In 2010 we moved to Georgia and I didn't think that would change anything. A few more years passed, and all of a sudden I saw that Paul McCartney would be performing in Atlanta in June 2014.

One last chance?

I got two tickets, but before we had a chance to go, McCartney became ill and postponed that part of his tour. The Atlanta concert was changed from June 21st to October 15th. When the time came, my wife wasn't feeling up to going, so I went alone.

I read a review of the concert in Dallas two days earlier, and at least one part of it knocked me for a loop. The 72-year-old McCartney had performed for nearly three hours.

I'm eight years younger and I was pretty certain I couldn't sit through a three-hour concert. As it turned out, he didn't play for three hours. He played for three and a half hours, and I made it through only two thirds of it before I couldn't manage any more.



Of course I missed the wonderful stuff at the end, but it's stuff I have on CDs from other McCartney tours. What I heard was a great mix of the Beatles, Wings and Paul's later solo career. The opening number, "Eight Days a Week," brought a smile to my face, and the third one, "All My Lovin'," brought tears to my eyes.

Jeez, 1964.

Fifty years ago.

Two songs from the classic "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" album -- "Lovely Rita" and "Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite" -- really touched me, because they were songs the Beatles never performed live.

I lasted for about two hours and 15 minutes and I had nothing left. I left right after Paul sang one of my favorite of his songs -- 1975's "Band on the Run." I hummed it all the way to the car and then played a McCartney CD on the way home.

I'm sorry I didn't last for the whole show, but definitely glad I made it at all.

It was well worth the wait.

Time passes, both good and bad, but we have to hang in

"If you live long enough, you will lose everyone you ever loved."

I don't know exactly when I first heard those words, but I do remember the first time they meant something to me. It was Thanksgiving 2008, a very"circle of life" year in my life.

In January I lost my job after 29 years in journalism. I probably deserved it, but my employer had sold out in 1999, and the next eight years were spent working for people I would never have chosen to be my bosses.

My parents in 2006

In March I lost my dad, who died at 82 after years of fighting various illnesses and medical conditions. When we buried him at Arlington National Cemetery, it was only the fourth family funeral I had attended -- two grandparents, a young nephew and my dad.

In September the wheel started turning when my first grandchild, Madison Nicole Kastner, was born in Beijing. And at Thanksgiving in Southern California, I learned that the oldest living American -- an Indiana woman -- had just died at the age of 115.

Six years later, I have forgotten her name, but I remember some of the facts. She lived in three different centuries -- the 19th, 20th and 21st. She was married once. Her husband died of a heart attack when she was only 38 and she never remarried. Seventy-seven years alone.