Why waste your life crying about those who wronged you in the past? Retribution is never the answer.

Sixty-nine years ago this Memorial Day weekend, Louis Zamperini’s B-24 splashed down in the Pacific after losing an engine in a bombing run. He was now embarked on a harrowing two-year saga, starting with 47 days on an inflatable raft with several other crew members, fighting off starvation and sharks big enough to chomp their flotation device in half. Zamperini, now 95, was almost dead when captured by the Japanese, where he was brutalized and tormented by prison guards, including one particularly vicious one. The Laura Hillenbrand book, Unbroken, recounts his story, which is one of both redemption and forgiveness.

I read the book, which is meticulously researched, and highly recommend it. I guarantee that if you read it, you will wonder how anyone could forgive human beings who did the inhumane things that were done to Zamperini. It is human nature to make them caricatures of evil, begging for some ultimate revenge to achieve justice, even closure. He had to take a circuitous path to come to this conclusion, including bouts with alcoholism and depression. Very few people on this Earth had more to forgive than he did. When I look at the perceived wrongdoings and thoughtless acts committed against me, it all seems rather trivial. I accept that forgiving allows you to shrug off an oppressive weight, freeing you from a self-imposed prison of resentment. Accepting and doing are different processes.

“Hate is self destructive,” Zamperini said on the CBS show, “Sunday Morning,” in a Memorial Day profile. “If you hate somebody, you’re not hurting the person you hate. You’re hurting yourself.”

Zamperini, a wonderful little guy who was one of the best milers in the world, a member of the U.S. Olympic team, prior to the war, returned to Japan years later in his journey of forgiveness. At Sugamo Prison he had suffered abject suffering and degradation at the hands of his captors, particularly from a guard named Watanabe, known by prisoners as “The Bird.” This man had dominated his nightmares for years after the war. Zamperini learned the fate of his chief oppressor, who had been driven to despair while being hunted and ostracized for his war crimes, committing suicide by stabbing. He apparently did not deem himself worthy of the ritual suicide of honor and disembowelment by sword, harikari. Death and disgrace. What better retribution could you ask?

It was a wave of compassion that washed over him upon hearing of Watanabe’s fate. There was no sense of satisfaction or vindication.

“At that moment, something shifted sweetly inside him,” Hillenbrand reports in the book of his visit to the Tokyo prison in October 1950 where, in a bit of irony, the former guards there were imprisoned.  “It was forgiveness, beautiful and effortless and complete. For Louie Zamperini, the war was over.”

This, not revenge, is real closure and it took some seven years for Louis Zamperini. For most, it takes so much longer, and, for too many, never at all. They die still psychologically ransomed by slights and sins, real and imagined, not knowing that the payoff for their release has been inside them all along.

In a sense, if the person you hate really had it in for you, you are pretty much doing him or her a favor by allowing it to sour your life years, even decades, later. Some World War II veterans never got over hating the Japanese, as a race, because their hatred has festered like a malignant tumor. Anything malignant shortens your life, because, in my opinion, a positive attitude is essential for happiness, no matter how long you live.

As a Vietnam veteran, I never had that hatred toward the people themselves, because I got to know some of them well enough to recognize that they were a lot like me. As with the Japanese, they looked different and there were cultural disparities, but we were more alike than dissimilar. I think a lot of American soldiers realized that, and maybe that is part of why we failed in Vietnam. We didn’t hate them enough. Had I been a prisoner of war in Hanoi, lost my legs or suffered traumatic brain injury, I, too, may have had to carry the burden that could only be alleviated by forgiving.

As it turned out, I encountered enemies in the decades that followed. I call them enemies because they sought to do me harm, either by sullying my reputation and credibility as a journalist or taking advantage of my good nature and generosity. There were only two or three, mostly forgotten, if not forgiven, but I found myself thinking about one and daydreaming about acts of revenge as if that would somehow free me from this bond. The retribution was never anything violent, mind you, but more in the line of seeing them humiliated or defeated in a variety of scenarios. It was someone who had turned something that should have been rewarding and positive into something I felt compelled to escape to preserve my self-esteem.

I am trying to learn from Louis Zamperini, because he had so much more to forgive than I do. I think I’m getting there on the eve of this Memorial Day, as I hope all of you are who need to forgive before you can truly be free.

When your time's up, will you become toast?

Then there are the not-so-amicable, occasionally sanctimonious Christians who have been put on this mortal plane to tell the rest of us that we are going to Hell if we don’t wise up. You can’t just believe in God, practice what you preach and love your neighbor. You’ve got to do it their way, as dictated by the Bible—or, should I say, their interpretation of the Bible. That’s when the little church sign sayings and greetings become darker, even menacing.

There are the mildly threatening, like: “How will you spend eternity? Smoking or non-smoking?” Ratcheting up the threatening tone: “Exposure to the Son will prevent you from burning later.” Of course, protestant churches, going back to the colonial fire-and-brimstone preachers like Jonathan Edwards, have historically excelled at scaring us toward salvation. Yet I see nothing charitable or Christian about outright threats, betraying the arrogance of those smug in their assurance that they are guaranteed eternal reward.

I saw a curious, albeit blunt, message on a sign outside one country church recently. It was short and sweet. All it said was, “Turn or burn.” It took a couple of seconds to register, and then I did a slow burn myself. In fact, I almost turned and committed an act of vandalism. Fortunately, my Christian upbringing prevailed. Okay, maybe my fear of prosecution had something to do with it.

The judgment of many conservative Christians is that you will burn in Hell, as that sign I saw so bluntly proclaimed, unless you turn from your sinful ways. Isn’t that a warm, welcoming message to lost souls seeking a loving God’s embrace? In other words, do it our way or you’re toast.

The fact that the Bible, as we know it, has been doctored, trifled with and adulterated more than the house stew at a cook’s convention makes it a flawed guide. Many of its teachings, parables and stories provide hope and consolation to many. I, too, believe that the soul lives on, as do all of the major world religions, but I’m not so sure that the threat of roasting in an underground inferno for an entire afterlife is the key to making you a better person. In the field of corrections, this is known as being scared straight. The consequences of harsh punishment might keep you from breaking the law, but does it wash the wickedness from your heart?

Returning to the Bible, which many Christians believe has all the answers you’ll ever need, there are all the different ways to interpret what’s in there. Actually, living life and learning first-hand about the good and bad out there apparently does not count for much. It’s about deprivation and resisting the temptation to commune with the unwashed masses. Many Christians send their children to schools that teach the tenets of the denomination of their particular religion. It is viewed as Christian education. Others do so because they don’t want their children exposed to the evils of the outside world as are likely to be encountered in public schools. This is merely resisting temptation by avoidance.

Particularly irksome to me are those who, through some mystical insight, know exactly what awaits us on the other side. Some are certain it’s a paradise, with a set of wings coming with your ticket of admission. Others see it as disembodied souls, glowing with goodness and wisdom, who get to hover about us, especially the people they loved, as guardian angels. Let’s hope they have nothing to do with some of those church sayings.

That’s the reward part of the afterlife. The punishment side, in the beliefs of many, is still very close to the tortures and sufferings related in Dante’s Inferno some 500 years ago. That was a work of fiction from the creative mind of Dante Alighieri, but it was derived from the seeds planted by the Catholic theology of his time. I’m not sure Dante believed any of it. He may have been having fun sharing a tale in verse. Even the non-committed, spiritually stagnate, are subject to eternal punishment, though it a slightly higher station than the depths of Hell. They did nothing wrong, other than failing to commit to the teaching of their church, and perpetuated the concept that not taking the Bible seriously, failing to accept Jesus Christ into your life, is enough to send you to eternal damnation.

That, of course, would eliminate something like three quarters of the world’s population, including many who never even had the chance to read the Bible or hear a Christian sermon. It’s sort of like that old axiom about breaking the law: Ignorance of the law is no excuse. Ignorance of the Bible does not pardon you from Hell.

Who are these people who not only know where they are going after they die, but what’s in store for the rest of us? It reminds me of another saying I saw on a church sign the other day:

“You think life is full of surprises? Wait until you die!”

It’s just another way of saying, “Turn or burn.” I have a feeling we’re all in for a surprise when we die, but I doubt the scribblers of church slogans know any more than the rest of us.

Lost your access to your backup? Changing language can be puzzling.

Just think of how the meaning of one word in particular— virtual— has changed since computers became part of our lives. The term real-time is relatively recent, because just about everything happened that way before our world became virtual. I’m not sure if download was actually a word before computers, and I know upload wasn’t, but the former is receiving a data file and the latter is sending one elsewhere.  It took me a while to get the two straight. This is all done in cyberspace, which is virtual reality and was unknown to the general public as recently as 20 years ago.

Getting access was not something I worried about before computers, but now I can’t get anything done without it. Most everything what wasn’t electrical was wireless and tended to be simple. Now wireless is something complicated that makes our lives simpler. I believe wireless was initially used in reference to radios because they communicated through thin air.

It’s easy to joke about viruses, webs, mouse pads and cursors, and they are common email fodder, especially among those of us who were well into our adult lives and careers before computers became common in homes and businesses. Smartphones and other personal devices seemed to be here, part of our culture, perceived as necessities, in the blink of an eye. There is an app for everything and blue tooth allows us to go hands-free. Would the preceding sentence have made any sense to most of us just a decade ago?

Of course, the technology has ushered in new terminology with it, but it is what it has done to the existing language, once familiar words and phrases, that fascinates old dudes like me. Hackers, for example, were people with bad coughs, adept at using axes, lousy golfers or baseball players who would swing at anything.

The word burn was about being destructive and incendiary, and you could do a slow one or get one by staying out in the sun too long. Now it’s about transferring data to a disc. This kind of disc, by the way, is neither slipped nor a source of back pain, and it is definitely not floppy anymore. Now they are hard and compact and known as CDs. This, too, will change.

Laps, by the way, didn’t have tops before computers. They only appear when you sit, even today, but now there seem to be laptops in every lap. Laptop was not a word 20 years ago. There were broadbands, though, and they were mostly on hats. Now it’s about high-speed transmission of data. They are measured by bandwidth, which has nothing to do with the space taken up by a group of musicians.

Backup is a fairly modern word preceding the computer and the internet, but when we hear the word now we think about all the stuff we have to protect on our hard drives. Hard drives, of course, were once torturous road trips, possibly challenging fairways on golf courses, but now they contain the information of our lives. Information is now data, of course, and it is all digital. Both were words that pre-date the internet, but most of us didn’t use them.

Utility used to be something practical, possibly a purveyor of electricity. It implied accessibility, things being made easier for you, but now it is a software app or program that adds functionality to your computer. A cookie was, and still is, fattening, crumby and probably delicious. Now they are fed to computers by web servers. Did I say servers?  Formerly known as waitresses and waiters, servers, when they aren’t feeding computers, are people we tip for handling our food orders at restaurants. I suppose that makes them food processors, which is something computers can only do virtually.

There have been numerous words that have been transformed over the last two decades— a speck in the continuum of civilization. Docks aren’t just for boats anymore. Windows may let the light shine through the pane, but now it is the world’s most popular operating system that can cause a great deal of pain when your computer crashes. Boots may keep your feet dry, but they also jump start your computer. As for streaming, it’s not just for water and air anymore. Think data.

I haven’t even touched on social media and the vocabulary evolving from that with its friending, tweets, twittering and some of the unfortunate abuses of the language derived from texting.

We are only at the threshold of the impact computer and internet technology will have on the words we say and write. By the way, computer, as a word, is already becoming archaic, because the types of devices that are computers have become so diverse and transcendent that it begs further definition and explanation.

That means more words to absorb and others to forget. As a guy in my sixties, I have become quite proficient at the latter.

Bill Gannon

There are a lot of comments, silly and sagacious, on Facebook, as well as some that are thought-provoking, vulgar, heartwarming, asinine, patriotic, vapid, illiterate, articulate, shallow, heartfelt, inane, insane, myopic, broadminded, witty, wry, unintelligible, startlingly insightful and just plain wrong. People are apparently playing a lot of games I’ve missed out on, achieving amazing levels of accomplishment. Most of these people work full-time, so I’m always amazed at the amount of their leisure time they must consume on social media and other forms of web grazing.

I work off the internet as a copywriter and my online time apparently pales to theirs. And, to quote Seinfeld, “Not that there’s anything wrong with that.”

The one adjective that I should have included was compassionate, because, despite my infrequent fellowship with my Facebook friends, they are always there for you when you really need encouragement and friendship, virtual but very real.  I must say that was true when my son, Jeremy, went through his cancer scare and when my wife, Mary, came very close to losing her arm, even her life, to the bite of a poisonous spider. On each occasion, just a mention elicited a flood of consolation and keep-your-chin-up comments.

This was never more evident than when we learned my wife’s brother, recently retired at the age of 65, was diagnosed this week with acute leukemia and was immediately bedded at the Hershey Medical Center. I mentioned this on Facebook, asking for positive energy and prayers as he embarks on two weeks of aggressive chemo to combat this well-advanced destroyer of blood cells.

Within minutes, the comments started coming in, pledges of prayer, well wishes and words of comfort that can’t help but energize him for the battle ahead. My brother-in-law, who I’ve known since elementary school, has already beaten some pretty steep odds. He was home for holiday break as a college freshman and a passenger in a car that slid on some black ice, went off the road and flipped, throwing him from the vehicle. He survived, but there were anxious hours when he was literally at death’s doorway.  He jokes that he saw the Pearly Gates, but fortunately, never got close enough to find out if St. Pete would let him in.

He was 19 and got a chance to come back and live what has turned out to be a full, productive life. Oh, yes, he had to do it without the use of his body from roughly the chest down. I never really thought of him as being a paraplegic or even wheelchair bound— except, occasionally, when I had to push him up a steep hill or pull him up a bumpy, unending series of steps.

I can still hear his lilting voice, prodding me on with encouraging advice like, “Put your back into it, Hammer Ass.”

Things were not all that accessible in the late sixties and seventies, but he went back to college and served most of the rest of his life in public service, including several terms as a county commissioner and the last couple of decades in Harrisburg working for three different governors as a key administrator for the developmentally disabled. He made life better for other so-called disabled people by helping remove barriers that were there due to decades of ignorance or insensitivity.

He was an art student at the time of his accident and a bit of a free spirit, so I’m not sure what direction he would have gone had he not been riding in that car that night. He thinks he had already embarked on a circuitous route to finding himself. Instead, he faced the stark reality of getting on with life with what he had left: his brains, his heart and his hands.

Come to think of it. People have done a lot with less.

The amazing response to his latest setback was really about him and an appreciation for the person he has become and all those lives that are better because of him—and not just people with disabilities. He had to deal with a few hammer asses along the way, but most of us liked him anyway.

So, William Albert Gannon, my brother-in-law and friend, is at another crossroads some 46 years later. The first proved the depth of his courage and character. Both have only become deeper over the intervening decades. Combine that with all that positive energy out there emanating from friends, family, supporters and admirers, and the prognosis doesn’t seem quite as daunting.

Cut the mushy stuff. There's nothing romantic about growing old. Or is there?

I run across retirees who are my juniors all the time, but Mary’s entering the so-called pasture is a reality check. I retired from newspapers a year ago, but I moved on to freelancing my writing skills as a source of income, so I don’t think of myself as retired. Also I’m still a few months shy of that magic age—65—that seems to be the threshold into old age.

Mary, by the way, doesn’t look or act like a person in her sixties, and that has always helped me feel younger than I really am— even though I apparently look like an old guy myself. I make this assumption because people in their forties have been addressing me as “sir” for several years now. Then there was that one callous young fellow in the line at the grocery store the other day saying, “After you, Pops.”

That’s what you call being polite and insulting at the same time. Naturally, I couldn’t resist responding, “Oh, bless you, Sonny.” I was being facetious, but I played it straight, and I enjoyed the twitch of confusion and irritation that flitted across his face. It confirmed that “Pops” had been a put-down and not a good-natured appellation on his part. I actually felt good when I heard him ordering a carton of cigarettes as I walked out of the store.

“Take that, Sonny,” I was thinking to myself, pleased that he was an idiot who was slowly committing suicide. “Pops might outlive you after all.”

Okay, so it was mean-spirited on my part, even disturbing, but it turned a negative into a positive for me. People aren’t necessarily trying to insult you when they say things like that, but they aren’t exactly being sensitive either. You see, a lot of us old guys still think of ourselves as young. A glance at your reflection in a window or mirror can snap you back to the real world, contemplating your own mortality and the fleeting time you have left. It may be just me, but when I look at myself in the mirror while shaving or checking for emerging ear hairs (when you shave your head, by the way, ear hairs are particularly noticeable, as are wild ones sprouting from your eyebrows), I see a younger version of myself.

I see people my age I’ve known all my life and they don’t seem all that old. However, I’m never quite prepared for the old friend I haven’t seen in thirty years. Where did that old fart come from? I’m sure he’s thinking the same of me.

High school class reunions are a great place to observe the random desecration of aging. There’s always somebody there who looks like he or she hasn’t aged at all. Usually turns out to be the significant other of a classmate who robbed the proverbial cradle. I often wonder how depressing it is for a thirty-year-old woman who has married a guy in his sixties. It’s bad enough that she’s got herself a geezer ‘til death do they part (and it probably won’t be long), but now she’s got a room full of hubby’s old-fogey classmates to send her spirits plummeting. It may even dawn on her that she wasn’t even born until a decade after her spouse’s graduation day.

You seldom see the thirty-something guy with the sixty-something woman. Some old guys seem to need young women to validate a reason to go on living. Just more evidence that old guys are the most unappreciated of God’s creatures. The chief benefit for a young woman hooking up with an old guy may be found in the old saying, “Where there’s a will there’s a way.” That’s “will” as leaving lots of money upon your departure, freeing the young widow to live life her way.

I’m not complaining or feeling sorry for myself. Hey, I’m fortunate, undeservingly so. I’m like an ill-equipped miner striking gold the first time down the shaft.  Aging is not easy, especially if you’re going it alone. I get to grow old—with the accent on grow—with someone I love.

Do reward and punishment in the afterlife keep evil at bay?

Heaven has always been important for Christianity as a means of keeping the sheep in the flock. Its alternative, Hell, was that not-so-implicit threat implemented to scare sinners straight. Of course, we are all sinners, so each of us needs a bit of scaring at times. For skeptics, being promised a reward for doing the right thing, striving to live an exemplary life, was nothing more than a bribe. Then, more confusing to me as both a child and an adult, were the concepts of redemption and forgiveness that are especially prevalent during the Easter season. The resurrection story told us you could still go to Heaven—or escape Hell, if that was more motivational—if you surrendered your life to God and accepted Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior. Even the most cursed wretch could go to heaven after a lifetime of doing whatever wretches do if he or she bowed to that great act of submission — even if it came on the exhale before the dying breath.  That belated stay of persecution somehow seemed unfair to those who had been toeing the line for most of their lives, but how else would you get converts to a faith without the promise of redemption?

Of course, you had to follow certain rules, and tithing and other paybacks seemed to be important as signs of commitment, I suppose, unless you got your free pass to eternity on death’s doorstep. This is the “amazing grace” referred to in perhaps the most famous Christian hymn ever written. There is no reference to Heaven per se in that ancient hymn, other than the promise that “grace shall lead me home.”  The Hell described in “Amazing Grace” is the living of life itself— the “dangers, toils and snares”— and the grace of knowing you will end up in a better place makes life worth living.

Heaven offers an escape from misery while Hell promises misery compounded, whether it is in Dante’s version which has scared many a Catholic straight or that sermonized by the most fundamentalist fire-and-brimstone Baptist pastor. Another great hymn, based on Jacob’s dream, tells us that as “soldiers of the cross” we can climb a ladder to heaven. This was a favorite song of the slaves held in American bondage, their only relief from suffering being the reward inside the Pearly Gates. Ironically, they practiced the Christianity adopted from the slaveholders who regarded them as inferior and not worthy of a place in Heaven.

I bring all this up after perusing the latest Time magazine cover story about how modern religion views Heaven. We practice religion, just as we do law and medicine, because we apparently haven’t got it right yet. I do know that a couple of decades ago, I wrote a column about the improbability of Heaven being a physical place, that it was merely a metaphor for the spiritual journey of the soul. That made both reincarnation and more restricted versions of what happens to your soul upon death possibilities. It explains miracles, visions and the wondrous things people say they see when they die and come back for whatever reason.

It also reminded me that when I wrote that essay about Heaven some people got riled up, branding me as sacrilegious and worse. I actually lost a couple of friends for taking issue with Heaven, though I never questioned the soul living on or the importance of spiritual enlightenment. My feeling is that it is a spark that cannot be extinguished, but maybe that just makes me feel better.

The shared belief that there is a Heaven, or a place of great reward earned by stellar adherence to your faith (or, in some cases, a dramatic conversion), is that you can only get there by being a good Christian —or Buddhist, or Hindu, or Moslem, or Jew, or any of the other eight major versions of Heaven ascribed to by the world’s most populous religions. That doesn’t include cults and minor sects and various concepts of something like Heaven within Christianity or Islam, for example.

I suppose many of us want to believe there is an ultimate reward for being good or doing good works. Some think it’s enough just to live a good life and be kind to people—at least most of the time— but not necessarily resorting to giving up all your earthly goods and pleasures to prove it. I have found over the years that really good people—even some who don’t even belong to a church or religion— are more concerned with doing the right things than gaining some kind of reward or recognition. Most of us want credit or at least a warm and fuzzy epitaph.

I guess what I’m saying is that the really blessed people  do not need the promise of reward or threat of punishment in the afterlife to do good in this life.

Okay, things got a little serious toward the end of the decade with America’s involvement in Vietnam. Young people, mostly men, were dying and generations were colliding. Even though I was one of those called to arms in that war, I never felt any antipathy toward those who protested, even those who burned their draft cards or took up residence in Canada. They stood up for what they believed in. Some of us who went to ‘Nam, still just kids ourselves, did so on faith that our country and its cause were on the side of right. Others believed that we needed to stop those dominos of Communism from falling and claiming yet another government, inching closer to our coveted way of life.

Whatever our take was on the political and moral issues of the sixties, most of us shared a love for the music of our generation. Before the United States got engaged in the first war it ever lost (not including the Civil War and the wholesale slaughter of our own countrymen) everything was right with the world and that was reflected in the music.

As a bona fide Baby Boomer, I dare say that my introduction to rock music was not all that different from others born between 1946 and 1950. The music in my house as a child consisted mostly of Christian hymns and gospel music. I liked some of it,  and It taught me how to harmonize and how a song could get your juices flowing.

One of the first songs I remember from the radio was by the McGuire Sisters called “Sugar in the Morning.” No, they weren’t exactly rock ‘n’ roll, more like Big Band, but it was transitional and stands out in my memory as a child of 10 or 11. Another song lodged in my memory at around that time of my life was something by country artist, Marty Robbins, called “Singin’ the Blues.” It was a crossover hit, making it to the pop charts. I didn’t know what pop charts were at the time but it stuck with me. Jimmie Rodgers came along with a song called “Honeycomb,” again in the late fifties, and I was liking the direction music was taking.

My parents weren’t ready for rock ‘n’ roll on the living room stereo, but I knew they could abide folk music. My first album was the hits of the Kingston Trio, the likes of “Tijuana Jail” and “The MTA,” with that great three-part male harmony that would prevail in sixties rock. My younger siblings gradually succeeded in bringing our generation’s music into the Skillings household, but I was off and on my own by then.

By the time this country boy got to listen to Top 40 radio, the doo-wop stuff had pretty much come and gone, but I remember the excitement of the street corner harmonies of Dion and the Belmonts, starting with “I Wonder Why” and “Teenager in Love” and later Dion singing lead in “The Wanderer” and “Runaround Sue.” That was the threshold of the sixties, as it turns out, and it seemed over the next five or six years there was a great new song, another exciting band, every time you turned on the radio. Then Vietnam intervened and jolted our social consciousness.

Music was a big part of our lives in Vietnam. The anthem, of course, was “We Gotta Get Out of This Place” by the Animals. Every week, in the midst of the wartime madness and before the Tet Offensive put an end to it all, we drank beer and cheered Filipino rock bands as they covered songs like “Black Is Black,” “In the Midnight Hour” and “My Girl” while we tried to forget how much time we had left in a country where we weren’t wanted.

Returning to the states, I remember that the songs had become darker, a little more jaded. Two to the most frequently played while home on leave after Vietnam were “Born to Be Wild” by the Steppenwolf and “Angel of the Morning” by Merrilee Rush.  The hits were as diametrically opposed as the generation that listened to them. Later that year, in 1968, Dion would sing his last hit, “Abraham, Martin and John,” an elegy in the aftermath of the June assassination of Bobby Kennedy.

I think of the music of the sixties as ephemeral, because it was also a decade of change, ending in protest, disillusionment and bitterness. Disco would follow, as if mindlessness would wash away the bad taste of what had gone before. Rock found redemption in the seventies, but the pure joy born in the sixties would never be recaptured.

Running for your life may stem from the realization that you are running out of time.

Life often seems to be a series of lost opportunities. As is the case with most failures, there is much to learn from them. As a positive thinking guy, I tend not to dwell on those losses, except when it comes to one that is really a gain — losing weight. Like most people who put on pounds at the drop of anything tasty down my gullet, I have devoted a lot of energy and time to dieting and working out over the years. I have run so many miles on hard surfaces in my thirties and forties, usually with dozens of excess pounds in tow, that it has taken its toll on my knees, reducing the cartilage to little more than the depth of the sugary filling in an Oreo.

I have been successful here and there, giving me some insight on the fruits of denial, but I ultimately failed to incorporate diet and exercise into my lifestyle. The weight inevitably returned. I found I could no longer run without risking one or both of my knees locking up. My right knee was cleaned out with arthroscopic surgery and the left kept lubricated by injections that cut down on the friction from the joint rubbing together.

As a long-time runner, I always looked down my nose at walking as a legitimate form of exercise.  As I entered my fifties, with bad knees and accumulating bulk, it seemed I might never get in the shape I should be in. I had always exercised and played physical sports, but now I had none of those pastimes to motivate me into that exercise in denial we know as dieting.

Even Ben Franklin, portly in his own right, realized long before the wholesale availability of processed foods, that humans, since learning to cook their comestibles, eat twice as much as they really need.

I tend to agree with the author, Robert L. Schwartz, that diets are “designed to fail.” Diets, that is, as we are programmed to think of them, which is a change of routine in the food we eat—usually some type of restriction on stuff we really enjoy. A diet is the means to an immediate goal that we gratefully abandon once we achieve it. Diet is, in actuality, the food we eat every day. If what we eat every day, including the amounts we choose to consume, is nutritious and appropriately apportioned among carbohydrates, protein and fat, with sufficient fiber to slow conversion into insulin, we should be able to maintain a healthy weight.

Oh yes, and regular exercise is a must. I have lost about 30 pounds in 12 weeks, and the big change in what I eat is simply moderation and paying attention to what I consume. I factor in calorie intake, logging everything I eat so there is no excuse for rationalization. Over the years, I have learned what I should be eating, including good fats and good carbs, and I have had to adapt to exercise suitable to my age and capabilities.  The science of nutrition is finally coming around to teaching that eating fat does not necessarily make you fat. In fact, eating carbs makes you fatter quicker, because the body stores excess carbs as fat cells more readily that it does excess fat, which tends to float around the body looking to repair damaged cells before taking up residence as body fat.

It is not quite that simple, of course, because saturated fat will make you fatter than carbs you get out of real fruits, veggies and other non-processed foods. And overriding all of this is portion size. You have to get accustomed to eating in moderation, just as you do in most every other thing in life, including alcohol consumption and, yes, even exercise.

At the age of 63, I knew I wouldn’t have many more chances to get that weight off before factors like high blood pressure, impending diabetes, other metabolic disorders and heart ailments brought something into my life that I have thus far avoided— prescription medicines. So I started walking two miles a day and upped the distance closer to three. It is something my wife and I can do together, and we place great importance on getting that walk in. Then, as old energy levels returned and some of the weight started coming off, I turned to my elliptical, pushing myself for a perspiring and tiring 30 minutes to strengthen the heart and lungs. In another part of the day, usually after supper, I do standard calisthenics, weight training and flexibility exercises for the muscle tone that is so important when an old guy like me starts losing significant amounts of weight. Young skin looks smooth and supple after weight loss, but old skin tends to hang, droop and wrinkle after being stretched out for so long.

Twelve weeks is just a start toward fitness and gives me a better chance of enjoying good health for at least another couple of decades. The stuff I’m doing now is something I always knew I should do, but I made it too complicated. Maybe it just takes the threat of approaching mortality to make you truly wise.

Checking out someone else's reality may assuage your own boredom, but that doesn't make it meaningful.

Kardashian’s, ahem, integrity as an entertainer and artist continues to be impugned by people in the industry who actually have talent—even as their fan bases suffer by comparison. Maybe it is jealousy. Maybe it is the frustration of seeing idiocy and shallowness rewarded both financially and by the massive adoration of fans. Well, maybe there is some pity and disgust in there, too, but the point is that people are watching, devoting precious time to the consumption of crap when they could be spending that time absorbing things much more instructive in the pursuit of living more meaningful lives.

A recent critic of poor Kim was the star of “Mad Men,” Jon Hamm, the alter ego of Dan Draper, the advertising exec on the critically acclaimed AMC series. Hamm told an upscale British mag scribe that Kardashian was an example of how stupidity is being celebrated in American culture. It took Kardashian little time to Twitter back that her tremendous success as a producer, writer and creator, rewarded by an income that Hamm can only envy, serves as testament to the so-called carelessness of his remarks. That’s right, she used the word “careless” in countering Hamm’s opinion. I’m sure she must have mis-tweeted, because it seems to suggest that she writes something creative. Wait a second! Could it be that they are actually writing scripts for this stupid reality? That would make her a writer, actor and producer of idiocy and shallowness.

And we all thought this nonstop drivel was spontaneous. She certainly presides over an amazingly successful marketing empire, and that apparently gives her license to protest allegations of stupidity. You know, the laugh-all-the-way-to-the-bank rationalization that defines success nowadays. In an attempt at diplomacy and taking the higher ground, unfamiliar turf indeed, Kardashian concluded her Tweet thusly: “We’re all working hard and we all have to respect one another.”

No we don’t! I don’t use exclamation points routinely, but those three words begged for one.  Working hard does not justify stupidity and being an embarrassment to our culture. Yes, there is a lot of money to be made, a lot of fame to be gained by appealing to humanity’s lowest common denominator. Kim Kardashian, Paris Hilton and Snooki would not be celebrities were it not for all the shallow-minded people out there who feed on this pabulum.

Pabulum, by the way, is not a word with which most followers of the Kardashians and the Jersey Shore would be familiar. It has come to mean low-grade intellectual and cultural fare, but its original meaning was nourishing, if not particularly appetizing, food for babies.

I suppose you could point to the sitcoms that nourished me throughout my formative years and beyond as stupid and shallow, too. Shows ranging from “Leave It to Beaver” to the “The Brady Bunch” and beyond, it could be argued, were just as mind dulling as  “The Bachelor” and “Mob Wives.”  Believe it or not, reality TV, which is essentially following real people around as they deal with every day situations and stresses, goes back almost 40 years to “The Loud Family.” It was apparently ahead of its time, though it did gain a loyal audience, but most of us preferred the unreal family lives of the Bradys, the girls on the “Facts of Life,” and even the zany antics of a manufactured rock band called the Monkees trying get someone, anyone, to sign them to a recording contract. Yes, my generation preferred to escape reality rather than feed on someone else’s manufactured truths.

I’m sorry if I seem condescending when referring to those of you who feast regularly on reality fare, and I understand that most of you have little respect for the Kardashians or Snooki and company in their pursuit of converting bad behavior into profits. It’s a lot like not being able to avert your gaze from something stupid, silly or disgusting. It’s the going back for more, for another fix, that lowers our standards as a culture.

Reality TV, at least by definition, includes some very instructive programming— the likes of “Who Do You Think You Are?” and “Undercover Boss,” which, upon closer examination, are more like documentaries than phony reality.  As for Kim Kardashian, she might as well face up to the fact that she is marketing stupidity and learn how to handle criticism while counting all that money she’s earned from all that hard work.

C.B. Miller with Donna Kopicki, his caseworker at the John Heinz Institute in Wilkes-Barre where he underwent months of inpatient and outpatient therapy.

The other story is about a man who has become my friend, as have members of his amazing family. He was 21 years old on July 21, 1994, and a student and football player at Wilkes University when his life, both literally and figuratively, came crashing down. A rotted railing on a balcony outside a friend’s third-floor apartment in Wilkes-Barre collapsed when he casually leaned against it on that warm summer night. His 275 pounds plummeted head-first, before others standing there could even react, smashing into pavement below. The left side of his brain was virtually destroyed upon impact. He should have died. Had not a fellow student, formerly an Army medic, not turned his head and cleared his airway, the ambulance ride to Wilkes-Barre General Hospital a few minutes away would have been unnecessary.

I have spent several months interviewing him and others, along with the prerequisite research on traumatic brain injury (TBI), so we can tell the story of C.B. Miller. That’s C.B., as in Christopher Bradley, but also, as a newspaper columnist for the Citizen’s Voice would suggest months after his accident, for “coming back.” C.B. is definitely the comeback kid— because in many ways, in what he views as his second life, he is still a kid. But I’ll get to that later.

When you talk to C.B., whether it is in person or on the phone, he’ll usually sign off with a parting word, “Enjoy.” That one word tells you pretty much all you need to know about him. You see, that’s what he does with his life. He enjoys it. More importantly, he continues to heal—even 17-plus years after the accident—and he continues to astound.

“When I wake up every day, I enjoy myself,” is something he likes to say.

Here’s a guy who was in a coma, some of it induced so his horribly battered brain and crumpled skull could heal, for the better part of two months. He required 17 different major surgeries and the expertise of 14 different specialists—and that was followed by interminable months of therapy. After regaining consciousness, most of the words he wanted to communicate were trapped inside. He couldn’t get them out. That’s a common effect of traumatic brain injury, especially as severe as C.B.’s injuries were. Expressive aphasia means not being able to communicate how you feel or words you want to say. They just don’t come out, and the anger and the frustration must become overwhelming.

He has lived more 45 percent of his life since the accident, which he considers to be the beginning of his life. In that way at least, he is not a 38-year-old man, rapidly approaching middle age, but an adolescent, still exploring and, yes, enjoying.

“I was 21 when it happened,” he says matter-of-factly. “It’s going to be another four years and I’ll have lived longer since the accident than before it…” By this reckoning, in his second life he has not yet reached the age or maturity of his previous one.

He lives independently in his own apartment in his hometown, Towanda, PA, and drives his own car, which has been specially outfitted to accommodate a right arm that doesn’t work and a right leg that doesn’t work as well as it should. He is still a big guy. He might even be intimidating if he weren’t so friendly and, well, entertaining and funny. He shares his story with others as a motivational speaker, including at-risk youngsters and classes of students at his old high school. Once a year, he holds court over a class of physical therapy students at the University of Scranton. He wants people to know that if he can come back from what he did, their perceived barriers are minor by comparison.

I had written a feature story about C.B. for my newspaper some time ago and came away fascinated by him and the mysteries of the human brain. About 40 percent of his was destroyed, including the parts governing processes like memory, language, problem solving, behavior, speech, emotions, personality and understanding. Yet here was a man who had been able to earn a college degree—admittedly one course at a time and with the help of a Kurzweil Reader, which scans written text and gives it back to you orally. The reading and writing parts didn’t come all the way back, and it took 11 years for him to earn that bachelor’s degree, which was preceded by monitoring classes in the local public school system.

We’ll explain all of that in the book—and it is fascinating and impressive indeed—but it is C.B. Miller, the person and the soul behind the damaged brain that makes this comeback so amazing. Why is the sense of humor still intact, along with timing that would make a stand-up comic envious? The day of his accident has been erased from his brain, but he remembers just about everything else in his life. Make that both of his lives. Why are the memories still there? How did he escape the ravages of personality disorders, misplaced emotions and all the other things that could —and often do in TBI cases—go wrong?

Obviously, he deserves much of the credit for his comeback, as do his parents, Mike and Sharon Miller, and many others who were there for him along the way. In many ways, he was cared for by an entire community as he went through the long process of physical therapy and other aspects of recovery.

“A lot of people give up very quickly, and that’s not my game. I push myself probably better now than before I got hurt,” he says when we talk about what he feels he is meant to do with his life after his amazing comeback. “I’m not ready to give up. I want more.”

But, as you get to know him, what he wants isn’t really for himself. He feels he survived because he is destined to contribute something. He has something to give to others, he believes, and he has already changed some lives for the better, turned some kids around.

So stay tuned for a story about a great comeback and, as C.B. likes to say in parting, “Enjoy.”