Running hard toward life's home plate; Count your lifetime by innings played

It was 21 years ago this spring that my old friend Loraine Ocenas emceed my 50th birthday party and claimed its theme was: “How does it feel to have your future behind you?”

My answer, of course, was “my best years are ahead of me” and indeed, that turned out to be true.

Now at 71, if someone asked me the same thing at a similar party, I might attempt to say the same thing, but perhaps not quite so vigorously.

Where did all those years go? An awful lot has happened both to me and to the world we live in.

That 50th birthday party was in 1996. There barely was an internet back then and cell phon...