Aiming for 2060
Today marks the 105th birthday of my mother, Dr. Ludmilla Ann Uher Prosdocimi Marin Jenkins. If she had not died at age 100 four and a half years ago, my mother would have turned 105 today….or maybe Thursday. It seems that in 1916 it took two days in Lansing, Nëw York for a birth to be properly registered, so while born on September 14th, her official life commenced on September 16th. That little administrative wiggle will forever be in my consciousness for some reason, making administrative errors a part of my life.
When I joined my first and most impactful employer (at least vis-a-vis my career), Bankers Trust Company, in 1976, the firm was 73 years old, having been started by none other than J.P. Morgan himself. That first week all of these forty-five years ago, I was dragged along to a small cocktail party at The Dallas Cowboy restaurant on 49th Street (technically a tenant in our building) for the monthly new officers promotion celebration. It was there that I met John Hannon, then the President of Bankers Trust and a mere fifty-three years old (six years my mother’s junior). He was a funny guy who claimed to never want to be anything more than a ballplayer. He waxed eloquent at this gathering of young talent, including the forty or so newly minted Assistant Treasurers, the first-line officer title of choice in those olden days of banking. He claimed that in 1946 when he joined the new recruit ranks of Bankers Trust, the annual report highlighted the two newly minted Assistant Treasurers of the bank. He went on, with highball in hand, to chuckle that “now we make at least two new Assistant Treasurers each month by administrative error alone.” This was intended as a joke and as an offering of humility on behalf of the latest entering class of officialdom of Bankers Trust.
There is an important message in these stories and that is that none of us should take ourselves and our accomplishments too seriously, lest we be reminded of the role that fate and good fortune play in lives. Sitting on our high horses and proclaiming our success to be a function of hard work and/or smarts simply ignores the evidence accumulated since the beginnings of mankind. We all need and often receive the blessings of good fortune whether by virtue of our genetic formulation, place and time of birth or just the dumb luck of the moment. To not acknowledge the impact of randomness in our lives is both to defy the commentary of that slave on the back of Marcus Aurelius’ chariot who whispers in his ear that he is not as good as he thinks he is, and is to be taking ourselves altogether too seriously. There are none of us who are more than mere mortals and who’s memory is not lost to the ages after a period of time. What Moses, Christ, Mohammed and Shraddhadeva have in common is that besides being men of great accomplishment, someone bothered to write down their stories for posterity and those works have endured and been woven into our collective consciousness and culture. Human beings need to remember the past for some reason, presumably to assure themselves that there is a future that has them in it.
I was born in 1954 and will turn 105 years old on January 30th, 2059, a time that once seemed like a science fiction moment and now in 2021 seems more or less just around the corner. I have thirty-eight years to go and I will admit that I remember back thirty-eight years to 1983 with great ease and clarity. That fact somehow minimizes the span I face in getting to 105. But wait, aren’t there more ways than one to skin that cat? Pew Research, those great demographers, suggest that there are fewer than 20,000 people in the world who are at least 105 years old. In a world of 7.8 billion, that is a mere 0.0003% . Me thinks I had best get my cat skinning tools sharpened.
When my mother died in 2017 I got motivated to tell and memorialize her story as Mater Gladiatrix. And yet here I am, five years later, further memorializing her in my blog stories. The best way to create a memory, short of filming someone and telling their story that way, is to write about them. In ancient times there were legends which carried the benefit of aggrandizement and the detriment of both distortion and, eventually, fading from the repertoire. In writing something you have created a permanent record, at least as permanent as mankind knows how to create (hard copy and now digital) and that makes the story immutable for future generations. No one can predict if anyone will care about or bother to read your story, but it is there to be discovered and understood if anyone so chooses. The only thing better than a biography type story is perhaps an autobiography (assuming the teller of the tale can be somewhat objective and accurate) or, better yet, a body of work through which the reader can discern the mind of the storyteller. When you consider the manner in which historians add granularity and texture to their understanding of the life of anyone, they pay special attention to their writings and correspondence as one of, if not the best, ways to get into the head of the storyteller.
I have never been a person who cared for cemeteries or tombs and mausoleums. Anything that attempts to make grand a persons past life always strikes me as overblown and unnecessary. People will say that they serve a purpose for the loved ones in that they give a place of solace and remembrance. I, for one, do not relish the thought of any of my loved ones sitting in a cemetery or in front of some stone altar and paying homage to me. If they cannot have good thoughts about me without the help of a physical enshrinement, then I have not left a strong enough impression and deserve to be forgotten. I went to the memorial for my mother in Las Vegas and have seen pictures of it since then thanks to my sister, Barbara, but I do not need a physical gravesite to remember and revere my mother. She is with me always in my memory and comes to the fore often just as she is doing this day. Her mark on my soul is permanent and everlasting more than any monument anyone could erect. And, I have gone the further step of writing her story and sending it around to all who might have an interest in reading it. That is my memorial to my mother.
Strangely enough, I have two memorials already “set in stone” for myself, which weren’t intended as memorials at the time, but will be as much when time passes. I was placed on the stone carved terrace outside Uris Library at Cornell for the accumulated gifts I had given to the University. I had them put me and my mother together, etched into a piece of slate on that terrace. If someone needs a place to sit and reflect, that would be the place that defines me. I do like the thought of being surrounded by like-minded people who at least cared in part about the things that I care about. It is also a place my children are more rather than less likely to visit for general sightseeing and reunioning purposes, so they do not need to make any special trips. While there they may also go into Sage Hall or whatever new hall houses the School of Business, where my shining bronze face can greet them in the school’s Hall of Honor. They have already christened that spot with funny hats and stick-ons, so I know they know where it resides. In fact, it is at that spot that my daughter was wed and where my youngest son Thomas and I discussed his eventual relationship with what is now his fiancé, Jenna. While son Roger is less a fan of Cornell, he too worked in that building and passed that bronze every day, so I’m sure it haunts his thoughts at least once in a while.
I do not seek immortality. We live and we die. The world goes on as do my children and their children, as it should. I trust they will go on with an occasional kind thought of me, but no need to mourn me or my eventual passing. I sucked the marrow out of life as best I could and bothered to set it to prose while I did it. If my children or descendants ever want to better understand what made me tick, they need only look to the collective 1,080 collective stories (so far) on my blog. That represents sixteen normal books worth of words that go to the issue of who I am and what I’ve been thinking. That alone should be more than enough to tell anyone any secrets about me I might otherwise have had. In 2059 I will reach the 105th anniversary of my birth just as my mother is doing today. I am aiming for my children to remember me, at least for a moment or two, in 2060.