10 20 30 Meme

My brother has tagged me with a meme. Usually I ignore all of these, but this one is different, because I am going to break the meme a bit.

The general idea is to write about what I was doing 1, 20 and 30 yrs ago. Well, I will do that, but I will focus mostly on what was going on “today” and then also add “16 years ago today.” Today, of course, being Halloween.

10 years ago, I was at Penn State, starting my second year of my PhD program. I still had some course work to accomplish, and I was dreading the candidacy exam. At that point in the program, I am thinking that Halloween came, and went, with not much fanfare, although I am sure we did something for my son, and for my oldest daughter, who had just turned 11. Halloween, which is normally a well-marked day for me, most likely came and went with perhaps a few cards, a cake, and couple presents.

16 years ago (here I break the meme) I remember quite well. That Thursday morning I took my wife into the base hospital for the delivery of our son. He was born 28 years to the day after me. Yes, we share a birthday. Halloween. After some coaxing, he breathed fresh air later that afternoon, and for the first, and only, time in my life I video taped a birth. The tape later scared my parents as he had some rather low initial APGAR scores, driven in part by the fact that his pancreas was doing a GREAT job of creating insulin, and once he left the womb (mom is a diabetic) he wiped out his supply of blood sugars! The scores moved up quickly, however. Later, a nurse discovered that his collar bone was broken on the way out (he was a BIG baby!) and they immobilized it right away. (In a serendipitous turn of events, it turned out that the nurse had been in my flight during ROTC summer camp at Dover AFB back in 1983!) Later that evening, my parents took our girls to the circus! What a Halloween!

So now, on to 20 years ago. Oct 31, 1987. I was stationed at Pease AFB, having completed my first 1 1/2 years as a Logistics Plans officer. We had celebrated, just the week before, the first birthday of our eldest (yes, that means she just turned 21!) You can imagine how family-focused that event was, since she was not only our first-born, but the first grandchild for either side of the family! As for other events at work–I was beginning to realize just how much fun it can be working in the area of logistics, and planning for everything necessary to support a large operation long distances away from home. And since we were in the Strategic Air Command, you can imagine some of the operating conditions and environments that we had to consider when planning.

30 years ago. Well, I certainly wish I could tell some great story about a huge 14th birthday party. Or some great story about how much fun 8th grade was. But–it was 8th grade! Does anyone have memories from 8th grade that they look back on with any significant degree of fondness? I had some things I enjoyed in 8th grade. Band. FFA. Ag class. Actually, I think* 8th grade was the year we would have a garden as part of our ag class. Mr Durand was my Ag teacher. Mr Davids was my Social Studies teacher (a long haired wanna be hippie type, but a GREAT teacher!)

So there you have it. 30 yrs of history.