Sunday, January 23, 2011

The Best Day of My Life

I have virtually no life, so I often contemplate the mundane. Let me amend that. I have a virtual life, with nearly 1,000 friends on Facebook, 12 of whom I actually know. It’s offline that I might as well live on a moped. It would certainly provide more excitement than the routine of my every day existence. I awaken at 2:20 a.m. and am at work by 3 a.m. and, after a tedious day of ripping and reading generic newscasts for 5 radio stations for an insulting paycheck, am home by 11:30, grabbing a bite to eat while preparing for a nap, after which, I pick up my daughter from school and have dinner as I look forward to going to bed so I can do it all over again.
Because of a request to do so, I have been doing the aforementioned contemplating about the “best day of my life,” which, I can assure you, has taken a lot of intense reflection as it hasn’t been any of the more recent ones.
My first inclination was to respond with: July 22nd, 1947 - the day I was born. But, if that was the best day of my life, that would mean it’s been downhill ever since and that simply isn’t the case.
Many people list the day their child is born as the best day of their life. I have 5 and the last thing I want to do is insult any of them by listing one ahead of another. That would be rude. I refuse to be rude to my kids.
There are any number of wonderful things that have happened over the past 63 and a half years that I can point to as intensely great days, but, “The Best?”
I suppose I can say it’s the day I met my wife, but, I’ve had three. OK, maybe only two count because I found out about the first one the morning after a night of drugs and alcohol in a Philippine bar during the Vietnam war. But, nobody asked about the best NIGHT of my life. My second (first?) wife gave me two amazing kids and my current wife has given me three, so, you see, the “unfairness” factor has again reared its relatively ugly little head.
I have had so many career highlights, that it would be almost impossible to pick just one. Perhaps it was the day I met Sonny Fox and he hired me to do the morning show at WYSP in Philadelphia, jumpstarting what, to that point, had been a pretty banal career. Could it have been the day he asked me, a few weeks later, if I had ever heard of “Bob & Ray,” setting off a chain of events that catapulted us, as the first two-man morning team in rock & roll radio history, to #1? How about the day I was asked to join an experimental new project in Mokena, Illinois that was eventually to become the ABC Radio Network? I think it’s safe to say the “none of the above” is the answer I’ll be checking off.
Maybe the night, in 1977 when I got to got to the premier of “Star Wars” in a limo with Harrison Ford, Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher. Or the day I answered an invitation to go to Washington, D.C. to confer, along with a few other radio types, with President Carter to talk about an anti drug media campaign. I have many other “best day of my life” candidates from among the plethora of encounters during my long radio career, some of which I can actually remember. I could go on, but, there comes a point when even cool stuff can become very boring, so, I will add only that none of these qualify as the ultimate “best day” either.
All of this leads me to two conclusions. One is that the “best day of my life” is not, in fact only one day, but an amalgamation of many. The other, and perhaps most logical, is that it hasn’t happened yet. I think I’ll go with that one. That way, I’ll always have something to look forward to.

THAT’S HOW I FEEL………WHAT CAN I TELL YA’