Steve Mednick

Are we all beguiled by the enigma of memory? Is memory like a dream repurposing long forgotten segments of life into a coherent story for the ages? That could very well be. Then there is the character in a Dennis Lehane novel who said “a man is the stories he tells about himself, and most of those stories are lies. Never look too closely. If you uncover his lies, it’ll humiliate you both. Best to just live with the bullshit”.

So, the moral of the story is what you are about to read and hear is bullshit, plain and simple bunk, or maybe not. We’ll see. In the Odyssey, Homer talks about the complicated man, where he went, who he met, the pain he suffered in the storms at sea and how he survived. Simple or complicated we are the sum of our experiences, the places we remember and the people who made all of this life possible.

This is not the story of a great man, although, as you will see, I was hoping to make a mark. Don’t we all? Maybe not. I am an ordinary person who never discovered a cure for any malady or argued a landmark case at the United States Supreme Court or told the funniest joke or wrote the best song ever. I didn’t even discover a purple dinosaur in the seconds bin at a video store.

Yet I grew up in a time that was and will always remain significant, at least to us, the baby boomers. You see, I was born in the last years of the 1st 3rd of the baby boom that time between 1946 and 1964. We were the children of the greatest generation. We grew up in a time of prosperity and illusion. Unlike the apparently grey plaid decade many of us were born into , we grew up in a time of turbulence, observing the disintegration of institutions and the decline of that prosperity which continues as the time continues to pass in 2022. Advertising executives appeared to cater to our every whim. Our music was and remains central to the world, even today. At least we think so. This story is not mine alone. Many of us have lived this story and our children will reap what we have sowed.

I have lived a life with the people and at the places I will reminisce about in the words that follow from “Version Of The Truth” :

"I look back and dug deep, just to find the dark waters of dead secrets, which threw me for a while in the winter of my discontent, you never know which way it goes, you never really know until you lose it, was I ever really here, who knows? Is there an afterlife".