Connecting the Dots
Memories and musings of a small-town
baby boomer, in four acts

Prelude

There’s an old expression of dubious origin: “May you live in interesting times.” For those of us born between 1946 and 1955, the so-called “leading-edge baby boomers,” I believe this blurse (blessing and curse) is applicable.

Through the miracle of television and, subsequently, the Internet, we have borne witness to—and participated in—social, cultural, spiritual, economic, and technical revolutions. We’ve been labeled the Me Generation for our self-absorption, yet our idealism has rendered many positive transformations. We’re the proverbial pig traveling through the python of time, and we’ve left plenty of stretch marks in our wake.

When contemplating bearing witness to my own journey, I’ve considered that, due to the rather strange and circuitous progression of my life, it wouldn’t so much be an autobiography as it would a collection of short stories. In his 2005 Stanford commencement speech, Steve Jobs said, “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So, you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something—your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.” This approach hasn’t let me down, either, although I can take little credit for the creation of the dots or their eventual connections.

In some ways, my life has been like a role in an opera, in which I’m ad-libbing the early scenes when, suddenly, the conductor pops up from the orchestra pit to synchronize my performance with the musical score.

What? There’s a score? There’s harmony? There’s a storyline? There’s an entire production that involves more than my capricious little ego?

The plot suddenly thickens.

I apologize in advance for any errors and omissions; I am but a blind man feeling my way around the elephant and describing it accordingly. I’ve tried to be as honest as possible in portraying the good and the bad, the darkness and the light, the cathartic and the comical—not to sensationalize events but to, as Ram Dass once said, serve up my impressions as “grist for the mill,” for anyone interested to observe—and perhaps even take a bit of inspiration from. Or, at the very least, be entertained by some memories and musings, from this small-town baby boomer.

So here are my dots, and the storylines between them....

Autobiographical in nature, "Connecting the Dots" is the story of a small-town baby boomer as told through the lens of Joseph Campbell's monomyth "The Hero's Journey," and sprinkled with epiphanies throughout this four-act "play." Available now on Amazon in both Paperback and Kindle editions.