two years old

Chicago

Milestones

 an action or event marking or representing a significant change, experience or stage of development.

1950s

I was born in the 1950s. It could be said that coming into existence was my first and most significant milestone, as it is for everyone else.

When I was young, I used to get tonsilitis so bad that I had to get penicillin shot into my butt, which is how antibiotics were administered in those days.

I remember my brother and I playing with the electric train my father had bought us for Christmas although I never got to spend as much time with it as them.

I remember times with relatives and riding in my father's car.

On many days when I was in first and second grade, a kind older woman who lived down the street would watch me in her apartment until my mother arrived home, but the woman would get annoyed at how reluctant I was to eat (I had the idea that I shouldn't accept anything from other people). Eventually she told my mother who said that I had to eat if I was hungry, but I usually still didn't.

Also when I was in first, second and third grades, we had drills to get under our desks or go to the basement of the school, and we heard weekly sirens to alert us to the possibility of nuclear bombs being dropped on our neighborhood and city.

I spent time after school in a building run by Catholic nuns who watched over me and other kids in the afternoon in my early elementary school years until my older brother, sister or mother came to pick me up and take me home. In those days, everything was a milestone.

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16 years old

Chicago

1960s

When I was nine years old, my parents separated after a terrible night when my father beat my older brother, related to my getting very sick with diarrhea at school (although it's a longer story than that).

I had my only physical fight in the school yard on a gray, cloudy day at lunch time, with another kid. We didn't actually have any real dispute with each other. The fight was kept going by my older brother who wanted me to experience it. Other kids watched. I was a skinny kid who technically lost, but neither of us was hurt. We even said to each other, in the bathroom where the nuns had told us to get cleaned up, that we had no problem with each other at all.

I was in a classroom at the same Catholic elementary school when the nuns came in and told us that President John F. Kennedy had been assassinated. Seeing tears in their eyes when they told us to take a moment of silence and following their lead in sensing the gravity of the event, we began to cry, too. it was another introduction to, or intrusion of, world events into our young lives.

When I was 11 years old, I had my first birthday party in which classmates attended.

In seventh and eighth grades, puberty raged in my body and the bodies of my classmates and we noticed the girls growing breasts as well as our own frequent, uncontrollable, ferocious erections. Almost overnight, hair grew under my arms and especially plentifully above my penis, but no adults ever talked about these physical changes and sex. Instead, I learned the meaning of things from my best friend who had watched his older brother kissing and spending a lot of time with girls.

Those times coincided with graduation from elementary school which was a major marker.

I began high school and had my first gym classes where afterward, in the locker room, I took showers with other teenage boys in a setting that had zero privacy. It was a rite of passage in which we unavoidably revealed a lot about ourselves to each other.

When I was 15 years old, Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated and my neighborhood erupted in the biggest riots the city had ever experienced before or since, which were also happening in cities all over the country.

A couple of months later, Robert F. Kennedy was also assassinated.

At 16 years old, another traditionally significant age, I worked single and double shifts one summer at my first official, paying job in a restaurant at the Greyhound Bus Station downtown. I experienced my first promotions, from bus boy to dishwasher to snack bar attendant, fully responsible for cooking hamburgers and taking money from customers.

I saw my first huge parade for the astronauts who had been to the moon. The decade was seemingly filled with small and big milestones.

When the summer was over, I saw my first concert and I bought a ten speed bicycle which I kept and rode for decades.

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20 years old at the Chicago Auto Show

McCormick place Convention Center

Chicago

1970s

The decade began with my high school senior prom and graduation. Unknown to me, my mother cried during the ceremony because it was such an important achievement to her, one for which she paid dearly with four years of tuition. I was ranked third highest in the class, while my best friend was ranked first and another friend was ranked second.

I entered college with great a sense of anticipation of intellectual exchanges that would be much more mature and appealing than high school. It was an amazing event in my mind, in a large, state university. But aspects of the environment were often very impersonal and I had my first real and unforgettable encounter with racism in my fellow students.

When my family moved to the suburbs, I lived in a dormitory and got my first apartment on campus. Nevertheless, I had tremendous problems affording college and after a long financial struggle, I ended up dropping out which was an awful time for me emotionally, even though I would resume college courses at different schools afterward.

We moved to the suburbs and my mother bought a car for me to drive to help with the commute back to the city. It transformed my life in wondrous ways until one day a few months later, when a terrible, nonsensical dispute with a my hysterical sister who technically owned the house my family lived in, resulted in my being homeless and living in the car. That summer was the lowest point in my life and I almost didn't survive it. I tried to move to New York City, a place to which I had never been. It beckoned me in an unexplainable way. I wasn't able to find work fast enough and I returned to Chicago, without much will to live.

Through independence, I slowly recovered. I worked some unusual jobs including dog catcher and I moved into the first of several residence YMCAs, a type of housing for men that mostly no longer exists.

I changed majors to photography and took night and weekend courses at a different college downtown.

I got a job at a corporation and after waiting a few years for the opportunity, a much better  position opened up. I became their staff photographer and audio-visual technician. It was where I was first published in several ways, including providing photo essays and articles in their company newsletter and a photo of the CEO for an external magazine (Institutional Investor), portraits of 300 employees from the CEO to the mail clerks, images for the Management Training department and for the Publicity Department.

Related to my job, I also took my first airplane flight, from Detroit to Chicago, in a small aircraft that seated barely ten people.

Eventually I stopped living in YMCAs and once again got my own apartment. It was more  positive time, but I was secretly discontent. I had not reached my potential and was not ready to settle down with my girlfriend or live a more typical, domestic life. I wanted and needed to leave and go to a larger canvas to explore and create.

I bought a new car and traveled, including back to New York City which continued to beckon me.  After a couple of years, I got rid of my furniture. I flew and flew again to New York. At 25 years old, I finally moved to the city of my destiny. I restarted my life all over again from the ground up in the most challenging place of all.

New York was uninterested in me and the first months and year were once again financially difficult, I lived on the Upper West Side in a rundown, single room occupancy (SRO) hotel. It had no cooking facilities and shared shower for more than 20 people. After eight weeks in a crumbling room that was filled with roaches, I moved to a YMCA in Park Slope, Brooklyn.

After almost a year, I moved to an apartment shared with two cool male roommates in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. After working part-time and temporary, I got a full-time job and I slowly rebuilt my life, getting it ready for new, greater goals. It was a decade filled with major milestones.

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29 years old

Prospect Park

Brooklyn

1980s

One month into the beginning of the decade, I got my first solo apartment in New York City, a super-small studio located in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn.

A couple of months later, my girlfriend came to live with me. For a while, I was living a sort of domesticated life but it wasn't really me and thus it didn't last.

Afterward, for a brief time, I lived alone again which freed my photography to begin its next phase.

My images became noticed at the publishing company where I worked. They purchased photos and made requests.

I moved into a rooming house in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, with a shared bathroom and shower, which actually fueled my creativity further by giving me new subjects to capture. My portraits, architecture/cityscapes and photojournalism all intensified and reached new peaks of productivity. I built a tiny darkroom and printed thousands of black and white 8 x 10 photographs.

In the city, I captured young people and the elderly, political and social protests and demonstrations, parades and celebrations, and urban life. I worked extremely hard and very long hours but the first half of the decade left me with a collection that has maintained or increased in value as the images became historical scenes.

In the second half of the decade, I began working a full time job in another publishing company.

I also returned to living in my own apartment, located in a different area of Crown Heights than where I had previously lived.

My photography transitioned to become more focused on portraits and self-portraits. 

At various points, family members visited me in New York City for the first time and I gave more attention to them as I traveled back many times to see them in the Chicago area.

The decade concluded with more travel up and down the East Coast and my first visit to San Francisco, Big Sur and Los Angeles, which left a lasting impression as offering an appealing, alternative lifestyle.

In terms of my achievements in freelance photography, my return to full-time employment, my interactions with family members and my seeing more places by car and plane, the decade contained many milestones.  

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44 years old

Highland Park

Brooklyn

1990s

The decade brought entirely new experiences when I went hiking and camping almost two dozen times with friends or alone in the low mountains and valleys of Upstate New York, surrounded by amazing forests and lakes.

The second car that I had bought many years before had reached an age where it was not worth it to continue repairing it. I didn't actually need it to get to work which was usually by subway. It was helpful for errands and pleasure trips but in the end I sold it.

My photography transformed further into portraits and studio nudes. My work involved new areas of visual exploration that were far more daring in capturing the human body and more beautiful than anything I had done before. The audience had to be more limited or the images needed to be more selective, i.e., censored through posing and cropping. Nevertheless, I still considered it to be some of my best and most enduring work. The photographs continue to be used in essays and poems that I have written.

On the other hand, I worked harder on my job than ever before and I was promoted to a manager of a small but important department which meant some more money but also extremely long hours.

I encountered problems with neighbors, and I moved from Crown Heights to Highland Park, a very different neighborhood on the border of Brooklyn and Queens.

Technology entered my life in a deeper way and I acquired my first computer which I used on weekends to tackle the overflow generated by my job on weekends. The computer also enabled an increase in my writings which were often combined with photographs.

Travel to London and Cambridge, UK, and Paris, France for the first time provided a unique perspective from another continent. I interacted with incredible histories, cultures, institutions, structures and individuals.

Unfortunately, several years remained far too immersed in work at the company that employed me, where I built a database for myself and my staff to use.

I realized that I must also give more attention to my finances, which were vulnerable to harm through the whims of upper management. My debt was manageable but still too high, the result of years of multiple trips home to be of assistance to my mother. Each trip involved a combination of planes, rental cars and hotels. The costs had added up.

In the last couple of years of the decade, I moved to another apartment, technically the best I had ever lived in. It was larger than any place I had lived before. It was on the 20th floor of a high rise and it had a balcony. It was with the idea that my mother could live there with me as she aged. That didn't happen but the worst aspect was that I had been deceived on the rent that would be charged. It was also far away from everything that I loved in the city. After my commute home each night, I didn't return to Manhattan on my bicycle as I once had done.

Nevertheless, the decade contained milestones in visual creativity, job responsibilities, travel to Europe and residences.

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53 years old in my apartment

Harlem

Manhattan

2000s

The decade began with my taking drastic measures to reduce and eliminate all debt. I paid everything I owed down to zero. I started to save and invest like never before. It was difficult to go to such an extreme to reach my goal but it worked. My finances began to reverse and provide a little more security if something happened such as the loss of my job. I began to invest much more with the aim of having a fair shot at retirement in the future. My job was still as demanding as ever but it enabled me to handle all of my expenses.

And then two things happened almost right away, one involving our family and the other involving the entire country and world.

First, my younger brother, who was always extraordinarily selfish and materialistic, schemed to get money from my mother who was living with limited means on social security and a fixed pension. When he refused to pay it back according to her plan, he not only disappointed her (which was easily predictable) but he caused her considerable physical and mental stress. I ended up flying home and paying off the debt he had caused to save her more stress, whereupon he decided he didn't have to pay it at all as retaliation for being exposed. Although there's much more to the story, it was yet another family dispute generated by him that spiraled into pain for her. But it was only the worst situation generated by him up to that time. In future years, my psychologically challenged brother, who has documented issues involving schizophrenia and including extreme dishonesty, would create even more  problems.

But the worst happened on September 11, 2001, when two planes were used to attack and destroy the World Trade Center, which was only two and a half miles from where I worked. The first plane flew over my head on that clear morning. Throughout the day, I watched as thousands died and my home, New York City, received a devastating blow. It was the beginning of years of intense politics and a war that was unrelated to the attacks, causing yet more death and destruction. However, I never forgot the trauma, the tears, the searches for loved ones and lesson of that day: one could merely go to work and never come home again. It taught me that "anything can happen anytime, anywhere".

In the meantime, I moved into an apartment, this time in southwest Harlem in Manhattan, the same borough where I had begun my New York journey. It was after 23 years of living in various places in Brooklyn. In a sense, I was reborn. I was much closer to everything that had meaning for me. Harlem was still enormously challenged. There were abandoned buildings, rats and especially crack addicts and drug sellers. It didn't erase the convenience of the subway less than five minutes away as well as access to Central Park which was equally close by. It was so very imperfect and yet it also afforded me a reconnection to the most important parts of the city.

Then an event happened with the greatest impact on my life. The health of my mother, who had been dealing with illness, took negative turns repeatedly. I flew home to be with her and remained in her hospital until her last hours. That night, I entered an entirely different existence. The loss was like nothing I had ever experienced and nothing would equal it. As the executor of her estate and the person who had to make decisions, I was quietly resented by my younger brother who was also interested in her money and even stated to me that she didn't leave enough behind.

In the following years, more relatives from my mother's generation began to leave this earth. My travels were often connected to funerals of aunts, uncles and cousins.

There was a continuance if not an intensification of extraordinary work hours on my job, involving nearly every weekend. There were three additional trips to London and Cambridge, England which were founded in work but allowed me time to explore the British capital.

The decade did not always involve what I would usually describe of as milestones for me alone, but world events, the death of a parent and other relatives, were actually far more significant.

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65 years old

Central Park

Manhattan

2010s

Almost immediately after the decade began, I lost another core family member, my older brother who lived in Austin, Texas. He had pushed away all family members, including his daughter, for years and wasn't in contact with anyone on a regular basis. I had sent the police to do safety checks on him which I knew he didn't like but he was actually dealing with severe health problems. I asked the Austin Police Department, from which he had retired after more than one stroke, to contact me if anything ever happened to him. It was how I learned of his death and was able to tell the rest of our family. I traveled to Texas, as did his daughter, ex-wife and step sons. It was yet another major event for me and us all.

Otherwise, the extraordinary workload at my job continued. I reached what was for me an amazing age, a time that I had never imagined years before. It was remarkable to me. I had also reached eligibility for retirement according to my company's benefits plan at that time. However, I didn't feel as though I was financially ready yet and I kept working for two more years.

And then I found out about the loss of my father who lived in Toronto where he had been born and raised before moving to Chicago as a young man, marrying my mother and serving in the U.S. Navy in World War II. Despite positive beginnings, my father became a repeatedly threatening, negative presence in the lives of my mother and older siblings. He and my mother divorced twice and he finally moved back to Canada. I had not seen him since I was a teenager and I didn't miss him. I found out about his death through the Internet, which I had been checking. I informed the rest of my family and traveled to Toronto (more than once) to meet people who had been involved with him. It was a deep time of dealing with his history and my mixture of sadness and anger at the effect he had on our family.

Within a few months, I finally retired. It was an incredible, long awaited event. It ended the relentless overtime and opened up new doors for how I spent my time, and a reconnection to the things that were important to me. I had looked forward to it for a very long time, the chance to be closer to who I really was. The first two years were wonderful.

I traveled to my mother's gravesite in suburban Chicago and then explored with new eyes the city of my birth. I traveled to my father's gravesite with its new headstone and tried to close the meaning of his life in my own life and the lives of my family.

And then I made mistakes. I mentored someone who was not who I thought he was, a young person who needed a helping hand for a temporary amount of time. And I increased my help to an ex-sister-in-law, the ex-wife of my younger brother, who convinced me that she was struggling to make ends meet for her two sons. Both of these people took advantage of my generosity in immoral ways. My ex-sister-in-law was by far the most costly person ever in my life, when she used my credit card to bail out of jail her selfish and reckless older son, then spent two and half years not paying back the money as she was supposed to, while not telling him or anyone else the whole truth and pretending to have gotten him out of jail on her own. She never paid any money voluntarily, without being asked, and only paid a few dollars after waiting three years, because I insisted. The expense stopped me from doing everything I had planned and worked for while I paid hundreds of dollars a month to prevent the interest from ballooning the debt further. Her son let me know that he didn't really care about how his actions had affected me. I also lost the benefit of my retirement money growing further if it had not been spent so wastefully. I learned to never again help any relatives or friends financially. I also learned that I did not have family members as I thought and that I could never count on them to help me if I ever needed anything. They had the opportunity to help me just by paying their debt to me, but they would not fully acknowledge it, let alone pay. It was an unforgettable time that had no real end.

In my retirement, I gave much more attention to the creative sides of my life involving photography and writing. The results were placed on multiple blogs (online journals).

Toward the final months of the decade, I took a fantastic, long delayed trip back to California, with time spent in San Francisco and Los Angeles, followed by driving to Las Vegas and the Grand Canyon and Sedona, Arizona. It was the best vacation of my life, involving places that I had not seen in thirty years as well as places I had never seen before.

The decade contained many experiences and events, including the deaths of family members, that marked major changes. Even if they did not fall under the traditional definition of milestones, they were the same in terms of affecting me greatly.

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70 years old

Harlem

Manhattan

2020s

The decade was barely two months old when some of the greatest challenges for the world and for me personally both occurred almost simultaneously.

The Covid-19 pandemic began and life was totally turned upside down, especially in New York City which became an early. deadly epicenter of the most intense effects. Hospitals were overwhelmed and people began dying by the hundreds each day. The total numbers rapidly reached thousands and thousands in the city and, in the coming months, the rest of the country. Masks and fear accompanied each other everywhere we went, yet some people were defiant, believing in their own invincibility. They refused to quickly accept reality, putting themselves, family members and strangers in danger. Many of them and those they came into contact with are no longer alive. Vaccines were a year away and social distancing was essential to assure one's own survival.

At the same time, Wall Street and the economy went into free fall, there were shortages of supplies, medical workers were stressed beyond belief, businesses closed, restaurants and movie theaters were almost abandoned and unemployment skyrocketed.

Fights broke out against masks on planes. Right wing politicians and their newspapers/television networks were skeptical, opportunistic and against science. They kept telling Americans the wrong thing and making matters far worse. As the disease spread around the entire world, it became clear that the collective will to take obvious measures and the consensus that was needed to defeat Covid did not truly exist. Blame was assigned to anyone and everyone except Americans themselves.

Because of the behavior of others, I had to deal with Covid, too. A moment in history had transformed into years before the disease abated enough to allow, along with vaccines, a return something resembling normalcy.

A totally separate, nearly devastating health issue arose for me at the same time. One morning I woke up and could barely see out of my left eye. I sought emergency help but it was disgustingly unhelpful when the doctor's assistant misdiagnosed me and the arrogant, condescending eye doctor refused to talk to me, telling his assistant what to say to me. They both told me to wait weeks before they had any further time to provide care. This was unacceptable and I sought another doctor, after which I finally received medical attention.

I soon learned that I would need an injection of medication directly into my eye. My insurance wanted me to use a cheaper medicine which was outrageous; they shouldn't be making actual medical decisions in such cases and overruling doctors. Although the expensive medication was approved about a year later, there were continued billing problems with the hospital. Ultimately, I will have to receive injections into my eye for the rest of my life.

Within a couple of years, Covid reasserted its presence in the most unforgettable way. My older sister, who lived in Texas, was influenced by political and religious leaders. She had several health issues but she disregarded warnings about Covid and she refused to get vaccinated. She caught the disease and became extremely ill. Over time, a number of awful complications occurred, necessitating treatments that were as compromising as Covid itself. Her last few months were unspeakably terrible, while the doctors and her adult children basically all gave up on her. She died in the care of her youngest daughter, the last person she wanted in charge of her affairs.

The same daughter continued collecting my sister's social security checks, an illegal activity that I pushed my other niece and one of my nephews to put a stop to. My sister's death left me and my psychologically troubled younger brother as the only surviving members of our original, core family.

Another major marker, a birthday that is the advent of another decade in my life, is also the beginning of yet another personal era. I celebrate it as the accomplishment I believe it to be, that I have lived this long. I will not live to see many more decades. 

I look back on many trials and triumphs. I look forward with the knowledge that I will experience more difficult as well as beautiful days. Much more is to come until I reach the final milestone, a counter point to my birth, which will mean that I, too, will die. But I hope the memories and lessons, all the words and images that chronicle my journey, will live on in some manner, anyway.