Some time during the week of May 25, 1987, my young, teenage boys met me on Lexington Ave. and 57th street. I had just gotten my ear pierced at one of the many cheap jewelry stores all over the City. After applying an ice cube to the targeted spot, a needle goes through and sticks into a cork backing. A metal stud slips in the newly created entrance to the lobe tunnel. After a week of periodically turning it and applying alcohol, it comes time to debut your choice of jewelry.

The boys brought me two gold hoop earrings, probably around 3/4” in diameter. They had gone to a Macy’s, located in one of the endless selection of malls in the Garden State. They asked to purchase an earring for their father! This was a big deal for the three of us, and pretty incredible of them to do for me, considering I was going to put a couple of thousand miles between us. After 42 years in NYC, I was picking up and moving to Santa Fe, NM.

This break was a long time coming and I am not sure when my dance with non-conformity actually began. I grew up through the Fifties in Queens in a private home in a terrific neighborhood. I guess you’d have to say it was representative of the growing middle class, which gave birth to the house in the suburbs with a white picket fence. Women were housewives and men planned on working at a company their whole life, retiring on pension and social security. It was a fresh mold and hard to break, an adolescent America. The bubbling social hormones of individualism and defiance would erupt from that stupor and become The Sixties.

I was a leader as a kid, head of a small gang of bicycle riding, extremely bright, Jewish boys. You know, when you’re in front, you don’t get the hints that come with following. I suppose being a Gemini probably helped to push me apart, egging me on to find my own way. I was raised by Ida, a single working mother, whom I often worried about, primarily because her loss would catapult me into the catastrophe of being orphaned. I think a lot of people back then were incredibly concerned with fitting in that comes with being a first generation American. Whenever I veered off course, my mother would say, “What will the neighbors think?”

I was unconscious under my skin, keeping a lid on not feeling like I fit anywhere. I had no passion to be a certain kind of person. I always tested high for math and science, but I really didn’t care for the disciplines, although it’s what the neighbors would like. It was the world I grew up in.

I conveniently graduated Queens College in June 1966, prime time for the Vietnam War. I am guessing I missed the Sixties by about two years, a very big two years for me. I have to confess to not smoking pot until the Summer of my college graduation. I was happy I made it through school without it and bummed I did.

Miraculously, I found an Army Reserve unit that would enable me to avoid the draft and a move to Canada. I thought the war was wrong and I would have been the idiot who got killed because he couldn’t put a bullet in some guy’s head. After my active duty, I spent the next six years going to meetings and summer camps. I would wear a badly cropped wig that looked like a hairy bathing cap, shielding my unmilitary coif from the authorities.

I spent the next twenty years working in the broadcast advertising business, beginning a handful of years after the era portrayed in Mad Men. There were dress regulations, requiring a suit and tie and hair that couldn’t be over your collar. Initially, I thought it was incredibly cool to be a grown up and then I began to slowly resent the shackles, reminiscent of Ida’s caution regarding the judgement of others.

When I hit my early Forties, I simply couldn’t do it anymore. I grew my hair well over my collar and wore sport jackets and slacks, often forgoing my tie, a serious etiquette breach. Somehow, I managed to stay at one advertising agency long enough to be vested in their profit sharing, losing it all as a partner in a failed bar/restaurant in Easton, PA. I swear it’s true.  My accountant, whom we shall call God, was able to get it back and I eventually threw it down on a little adobe home, south of Santa Fe.

I wish I could convey to you to the weight of my decision to leave everything familiar, heading off to a small adobe home in the middle of nowhere, but it is too big, impossible to corral with words. I decided to mark this choice with an earring in my left ear, a mythological symbol, signifying the first born male. Having Danny and Andy present me with my hooped Excalibur fit me perfectly and it’s forever.