Today is my birthday. I am sixty four years old at 11:00 pm tonight. As I look back at the last sixty-three years, I look back with the awe and amazement of younger eyes. I see what I have done, but don't know how I did it. How did I get Bruce Springsteen to donate enough money to keep the Shore Area YMCA open for another 10 years? How did that one act place me in almost every major newspaper in the nation, and a few in Europe and Asia? How did I curate a Russian art museum, run exhibits for artists that were at the vanguard of their time, sit with Alexander Ginsberg, one of Russia's most famous dissenents, and watch the play, Zeks, a play about his life? How did I get to meet Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Senator Edward Kennedy? How did I teach for almost 40 years? How did I get to be invited to Oxford University to present a paper on education? When I tell my students some of these stories, they look at me in wide-eyed disbelief. I can barely believe them myself.
On this day in my life, I look back at those sixty-three years, not with the wise eyes of a sixty-four year old man who understands, but with the wide eyes of an eight year old boy, vulnerable, afraid, alone, and looking at the achievements of a man he can barely believe is he. As I look now down this alley I have traveled all these years, I cannot stop to wonder. I just have to keep walking.
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