Here’s an interesting meme spotted on Lady of Silences: where where you 10, 20, 30, etc. years ago. The older you are, the more interesting it becomes.
10 years ago: 1997. I was an income partner at my prior law firm, about to become an equity partner. Other than that, very few of the externals have changed. I was married to the same woman I’m married to today, living in the same house in the same neighborhood. We attended church at the Poor Clare Monastery across the street.
Then again, in many ways New Orleans was quite different. The mayor was Marc Morial; the police chief was Richard Pennington; the D.A. was Harry Connick Sr. Crime was on the way down.
The Saints, coached by Mike Ditka and quarterbacked by Jim Everett, were a mediocre 6-10. As for my own athletics, I still weighed around 140 or 145 pound (today
I’m 175 in birthday suit), and my string of consecutive top-500
Crescent City Classic finishes, begun in 1983, was still intact.
20 years ago: 1987. This was the Saints’ breakout year: coached by Jim Mora and quarterbacked by Bobby Hebert, the team went 12-3. I was a second-year nighttime law student at Loyola. My address was 501 Jefferson Avenue, at the corner of Tchoupitoulas, across Jefferson Avenue from what is now the Roly Poly sandwich shop; across Tchoupitoulas from what turned into the Riverside strip mall.
My day job was with Compu-Vend, a little company churning out specialized software for vending-machine accounting and management. The software was written in COBOL for PCs running DOS. The monitors were cathode-ray tubes; I don't know whether flat-panel displays had been invented yet, but I do know I never saw one in 1987. Apple’s MacIntosh was still fairly new; the ones I saw had black-and-white displays and a single 3½-inch floppy drive. Back then we thought of computers as tools for crunching numbers, not imagining that they would become a medium for communications or entertainment. The Internet existed, but I don’t remember whether I was aware of it; I do remember that it was inaccessible to normal people. Occasionally we’d have one computer talk to another over the telephone by direct telephone call, except that the talking was done via a 28-K baud modem. Otherwise, the usual and most practical way to get information from one computer to another was to copy it to a floppy disk.
30 years ago: 1977. I was a Catholic seminarian, a member of the Congregation of the Mission (a.k.a. the Vincentians), in second year of college at St. Mary of the Barrens in Perryville, Missouri. I was at the beginning of a spiritual rebirth. I got involved with the charismatic renewal, which changed my religious experience from a mere belief system into something personal. Those are really poor words to describe what happened, but I don’t know of any better ones, so I’ll just say that the change is permanent.
I was celibate. Being celibate certainly focused my spirituality, but it also hindered my social growth. I had no idea how to relate to women, let alone to a woman. (Still haven’t figured that one out.) In fact, relating to anyone outside the seminary was difficult; I felt regarded as some sort of alien. They made us wear Roman collars, which I never felt comfortable in. Despite that, I was happy. Why — I can’t explain. I just know that I was at peace with myself and my world. I had no idea that in less than a year, I would feel impelled to leave.
40 years ago: 1967. I was 10 years old, living with my mother, brother, and two sisters in half a shotgun double on South Rocheblave Street, just off Calhoun. My mother made groceries by walking to the Calhoun Superette. The groceries would be delivered by bicycle — a big brown bicycle with big fat tires and a huge basket, even bigger than a paper boy’s bicycle basket. The bicycle was ridden and groceries delivered by a black guy dressed in white, who received a 25¢ tip from my mom. I think by this time, we were getting our milk at the Superette. Before that, milk (in glass bottles) would be delivered once or twice a week by the milk man.
I mentioned paper boys. Being a single-parent family, we had barely enough money to pay the bills. So if you were a boy who needed money, you’d get a paper route. My brother had a paper route, delivering the States-Item every afternoon (and the Times-Picayune on Sunday mornings) to 70 or so customers. I was too young to get a paper route, but sometimes I’d make a few dollars for myself by helping him or Arthur, our friend around the corner who also had a paper route.
New Orleans was struggling with integration. I remember that at our church (St. Rita, on Broad Place and Lowerline), the black people were still sitting in the back pews. This was twelve years after Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat for a white man.
The Saints were playing their first NFL season. A friend invited me to their game in Tulane Stadium against the Eagles. For the second time that season, the Saints returned the opening kickoff for a touchdown. (Their opening-day opening-kickoff return against the Rams was by John Gilliam; the one I saw was by Flea Roberts.) They ended up winning that game; it was the Saints’ first ever regular-season win. The stadium itself looked spectacular. I had been in it many nights watching the Tulane Green Wave, but this was daytime, and unlike the Tulane games, the stadium was jammed with people. I was wowed by the noise and the color.
50 years ago: 1957. I was a newborn living in Addison, New York, the son of the Episcopal priest and his wife. Of course I don’t remember anything about those days. I do know that just three days before I was born, the Soviets got the space race underway by putting Sputnik into orbit — the world’s first satellite.
Nobody tagged me for this meme, so I’m not going to tag anyone else. If you believe that knowing where you’ve been helps you figure out where you’re going, give it a try.
I’ve never been the first kid on my block to own anything. But according to the folks at Saturn of Metairie, my wife and I are the first kids in the New Orleans area to own a Saturn Astra. This little puppy is actually made in Belgium, and though I’m not acquainted with European cars, it feels and rides as I imagine a European car would. This car is for my wife; it replaces her 1997 Saturn SL1, which ran fine but, on the inside, looked every day of its 11 years. Me, I’ll continue driving my 2002 VUE. (Yes, we’re an unabashed Saturn family; have been since 1994.)
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