Before I Go: My First Fifty-Six Trips Around The Sun

ONE SUMMER DAY in about the year 1961, my father told me that I would never amount to a shit because I hadn't finished mowing the lawn. Forty years later, my abbreviated biography appeared in the 2000 edition of Who's Who in America. I wonder what my dad would have thought about that had he lived to witness it. I still don't enjoy mowing the lawn, and I still don't know if he was right or wrong in his prediction.
How does one evaluate a life after all? I am, as a human being, completing my fifty-sixth journey about our Sun. I approach what Confucius called "the time of obedient ears," when many of the lusts have abated but robust health yet obtains.
Along the way, I have sought to open the minds of a few thousand students, disappointed a handful of relatives, married one couple, published about a hundred pieces of writing, saved at least one life, belonged to three labor unions, loved about twenty women, fathered one child, delivered baked goods door-to-door, attempted to meld quantum physics with theology, and helped a man my age to urinate as he lay near death having but half the face with which he was born.