Retrospectively

Today in many ways I'm the kind of man I never really thought I'd become. Physically, personally, mentally, professionally. It's quite remarkable to me bearing in mind the upbringing and life experiences I've described in this column over the last several years.

You know to what I'm referring.  The clues were always there: the failed relationships, defiance, restlessness, fighting, sex, drinking, dissidence, jail, etc. All dressed up, of course, in the uniform of the circles in which I was raised. That's me. I own all of it.

These thoughts were elicited by the recent discovery--entirely random, on an unrelated website--of a photograph of me with my late father in New York City in the early 1980s, both of us standing in jackets of Tweed with our backs to the camera.

How things have changed since then! I can say with some satisfaction that I'm not the sort of man I envisioned myself becoming, nor is this the life I sought. But here I am, and there it is.