High school memories: Going crazy watching Danny Schwab and Dave Becker and everyone else in the known universe except me making out. Making out, with eventual prom date Sandy Steingard at a party after a basketball game senior year, finally, and shouting out my car window almost all the way home. Hanging out weekends with Dago Dan, Dog Bone, Pot Man, Femmer, and Eiz, ragging each other like a troop of baboons. Wanting to escape myself, getting my hair badly straightened before senior year, winding up as Straw Man, and being frozen in time this way in the Enchiridion. Driving my mom's 350-cubic inch V8 Pontiac LeManns on Latches Lane, Delaware Avenue, the Atlantic City Expressway, and everywhere else. Cruising the pre-casinos Atlantic City boardwalk on orange platform heels and sharing a $10/night fleabag room with Dave Becker, still a good friend today.
And more: Forgetting to check in with the scorer at the end of a playoff basketball game at Nanticoke, getting a technical foul, and ending the season for our team, emblematic of high school in general for me. Earning four varsity letters, though this could easily have been seven, playing with bad feet, pain, dwindling self-confidence on an already not very solid foundation, and not much smarts. Really not liking Mr. Stephens. Really liking Mr. Osipowicz. Reading Sidhartha by Hermann Hesse and beginning a long, hard trek away from the straight and narrow and toward meaning, a trek that would take me long distances from sports and home and eventually back to find what I was seeking. Dropping out of honors classes in the middle of eleventh grade as I became disillusioned with trying and my grades plummeted. Being mesmerized by the song "Drift Away" by Dobie Gray, wishing my soul was free and I was drifting away.
My Bala Cynwyd Junior High memories are considerably fonder: 22.4 points a game in ninth grade, setting the school's varsity basketball scoring record, thinking I was something. Captain of the basketball team, co-captain of the football team, and not captain of the baseball team because by this time my head was too swollen. Elected treasurer of the school but only with a big boost from speechmaker Miriam Silver. Mr. Turner taking me to Palestra games. Mr. Hoffman as a great basketball and football coach. Robin Pollow, Laurie Stern, and the other amazingly watchable and untouchable cheerleaders. Going out on my first date, to a movie, with Jean Maguire, and drinking lemonade on her porch way too nervously. Linda Ellis offering to wipe off my glasses and Jane Konowitch saying I was in a dream of hers, these dumbstruck, totally innocent, and seemingly insignificant moments indelibly etching into my consciousness as I inched my way from cluelessness to semi-cluelessness. Having a hard time saying "Me llamo Reid Goldsborough" in Spanish class, justifiably being made fun of for this by Hank Kulzer, and not really minding, then as now, because it crystallized for me my main issue.
And more: Playing one-on-one tackle football in the snow in front of my house for hours on end with Larry Kadison. Taking the Manyunk Local with Larry to coin shops in Center City, eating at King of Pizza afterward. Playing indoor tennis and every sport under the sun with best friend Danny Schwab, who I continued playing basketball, tennis, and softball with into my 20s and 30s. Racing up the Washington Monument during the ninth-grade class trip and losing only to Kevin Farnsworth. Winning awards in ninth grade as Student Athlete and Citizen Athlete.
After Lower Merion I went away, first, to Boston University, graduating with honors and a Bachelor's degree in business administration, working hard but without much heart in it. I decided right before graduating that I didn't want to spend my days in a cubicle working for a paycheck every two weeks. My foresight could have been better. Through much of my 20s I struggled to find myself, doing lots of reading, writing ridiculous poetry, and dabbling in Eastern spirituality. This wasn't a particularly happy time, but I did travel a fair amount and work abroad for long periods, including internships as a researcher for a steel company in Sweden and as an editor of English for a bank in Greece and jobs as a farm worker on a kibbutz in Israel and as a teacher of conversational English in Finland, and I lived without working for stretches in France, Spain, and Tunisia. My wanderlust had been kindled earlier, one summer during college, when Richie Frank and I worked as laborers at a factory in England and hitchhiked and Eurail Passed around Europe. The travel was both horizon expander and confidence booster.
After finally returning home for good I started working at a series of low- to mid-level jobs, climbing out of my hole, getting a Master's degree in journalism from Temple University at night while working full time during the day, living in West Philadelphia near Penn for 12 years. I was a reporter for a community newspaper, canvasser and PR flak for an environmental nonprofit, director of a small air pollution information center, writer (of sorts) for a corporate consulting firm, assistant editor then editor of a small photography magazine, staff editor at an optometry magazine, and writer for a medical public relations and advertising agency.
I did a bit of adventuring during this period as well. Experiences included running up the steps of Pyramid of the Sun outside of Mexico City at an altitude of 6,000 feet but not being bothered because of the 10-kilometer races I'd been running, a six-day white water paddle rafting trip down some fairly treacherous rapids of the Colorado River and at the end enduring a grueling day-long climb up the South Rim of Grand Canyon, freefall skydiving in sheer terror and excitement (mostly terror) from 10,000 feet up in central Pennsylvania, scuba diving down to 50 feet below off St. John and immersing myself in a totally alien and beautiful environment, doing a Club Med vacation in Mexico and as a result of tearing my anterior cruciate ligament in a pickup game ending my basketball playing days though not my adventuring, backpacking through Yosemite National Park but deciding to go off on my own and bushwack through some brambles and winding up with the worst case of poison oak in the history of the world, and free solo rockclimbing by the Cliff House near the Golden Gate Bridge, falling, and nearly ending things before they got interesting.
Socially during this time I mostly went from one one-to-two-year relationship to another, most ending because I wasn't yet ready or willing to commit for the long haul. Still hadn't found myself. Still would have found it difficult to say "Me llamo Reid Goldsborough." But by age 37 it was time, and I got married in 1992. Shortly before the wedding, as Jody and I were buying a house together, I went off on my own professionally and became a full-time freelance writer. As with college, my timing was less than perfect. This almost stopped things in their tracks, but she hung in there, and we honeymooned in Israel.
Over the years I've written about a lot of subjects, including travel, the environment, health care, politics, business, community affairs, history, and photography. No sports writing -- I suppose sports for me was preparation. But I gravitated toward writing more and more about computers and then the Internet as well, fascinating technologies that were ushering in a new era of personal productivity and global communication. I got good at it, and by the time I was writing cover stories for PC World magazine I was offered my own column at the Philadelphia Inquirer, which I named, totally unimaginatively, "Personal Computing."
This was 1994, and that same year I also wrote my first book, Straight Talk About the Information Superhighway, published by Macmillan, which wound up being used among other places in college classrooms during the 13-minute window in which it was still up to date. Also that same year our two children, Eric and Michelle, were born, together, six weeks early and 4.9 and 3.3 pounds respectively but alive and kicking hard. At 39 I could finally hold my head up and say "Me llamo Reid Goldsborough." My column was nationally syndicated three years later, and over the past decade I also had another computer column, with MSNBC, and was a co-author of the annual Consumer Guide book Computer Buying Guide. It hasn't been all wins, lately as well. I spent a year and a half writing a novel that went nowhere.
My main column ended with the Inquirer after nearly 12 years when the paper was sold twice in 2006, shrinking in size, but my column still appears in other newspapers and magazines around the country. Before this I had turned down a full-time job as a staff columnist for U.S. News & World Report, which in hindsight given the Inquirer's implosion was a mistake. Right now I'm looking around, or at least thinking about, what's next. (Ideas welcome.)
In addition to still writing about computers, which is future oriented, I write a lot these days about a hobby of mine, ancient coins, which is past oriented, the balance keeping me more or less balanced myself. These little disks of gold, silver, and bronze, impossibly old and beautiful, are visible and tactile portals back to a time when the very foundations of our culture and way of thinking were forming. They help clarify the big picture, and they're great fun. I go to major coin conventions around the country, talk online with other like-minded coin nuts, do studies, write articles for scholarly magazines, and will be writing at least one book.
Writing recognition includes a national Neal award for editorial excellence, two Chilton awards, two Addy awards, two Rx Club awards, and a Numismatic Literary Guild award. Despite the fact that I'm orders of magnitude better with the written word than the spoken and still have some of the same shyness I had as a kid, I've been asked, and oddly enough asked back, to talk to classes of college and high school students about writing and journalism, and I've given presentations about writing and the Internet to the Philadelphia Writers Organization, the Philadelphia Area Computer Society, and the national Medical Marketing Association.
Self-analysis: A manner that's perceptive, exacting, and tenacious but can still be cloddish, a character that's unflinchingly open, honest, and empathetic but occasionally selfish, a temperament that's mostly even-keeled but once in while swings toward low self-confidence at one extreme and mostly unaware arrogance to compensate for it at the other extreme, an outlook that's unfailingly optimistic even when it sporadically dips into crankiness, and a sense of humor (or attempted humor) that runs the gamut from self-effacing to shock-jock, wry to clownish.
I've been married only once, working hard at it. Jody and I live in Rydal in the northern Philadelphia suburbs with Eric and Michelle and our dog, Rocky. We live unostentatiously, favoring experiences over things, with these experiences including travel. We've taken the kids among other places to the Grand Canyon, Bryce Canyon, Zion National Park, two Caribbean islands, one cruise, Disney World, Disneyland, and Florida too many times, and Jody and I have taken a few vacations on our own as well. To give back I give blood to the Red Cross twice a year and have helped out with local park and playground building projects, volunteered to tutor immigrants in English, and other things. The giving is selfish, making me feel good at the endorphin level.
I coach the club basketball team of my son, who's 13, and who also plays on his junior high football, basketball, and lacrosse teams. He's not as tall but stronger than I was. Eric and I lately have also been playing ping pong together on a near daily basis in our back porch. I used to be good and believe I am again, at least for an old poker, but our matches are marvelously competitive, and fun. A 13-year-old and a 52-year-old playing evenly -- sounds about right. Only he's improving faster than me, of course, and my time is short! I can still outstrategize him. Using your head like this is really what sport, and much else, is all about, and it among other things is what I'm trying to pass on to him.
Among the other things I'm trying to impart to my son, beyond the drive to prevail, is learning to appreciate, many things, but at the deepest level the connectedness of all people and things both seen and unseen, all animate and inanimate objects in the universe, all matter and energy, space and time, you and me, and learning to connect to that connectedness, striving for that state of relaxed intensity, of empathic competitiveness, of egoless yearning in which you're both totally in yourself, in control, and totally out of yourself, seeing clearly, and now and again, hopefully more often than not, finding it, that wonderful flow of equilibrium, your groove, your zone, with the further hope that you'll find it frequently enough to have also found your way. He listens, but I think he mostly feels I'm nuts.
My daughter, who's also 13, does theater, dance, Girl Scouts, and school and synagogue clubs. I of course try to impart my thinking to her as well. She feels the same way about me as her brother.
Both Eric and Michelle won reading awards at their elementary school and now make honor roll in junior high. They both volunteer to read to younger kids at the local library. Both were recently Bar and Bat Mitzvahed. Both have minds of their own and chafe against each other and against us as well a bit too frequently, and they vacillate, seemingly on a daily basis, between being joys and handfuls. I know we're the only parents in the world to experience this.
Both of my kids and I work out together at the local Y just about every other day. They want to be buff, but mostly they come with me because I want them to, and I'm enjoying this influence as long as it lasts. I go to the Y because I want to live forever. My wife, a speech therapist, heads up the speech therapy department at a local rehab center. She works out at the Y too but not as religiously. Our dog, a mutt, doesn't work out at the Y at all, but he does have an invisible fence, and he gets exercise trying to chase squirrels up trees in our yard. It's a noble goal, and in going for it he tries his best while having fun. That's really all you can ask of just about anyone, including yourself. Play the game. Thanks for reading.
Here are a few Web sites I've put together:
- Personal Computing -- my computer column
- Numis -- a hobby site about coins
- Sinusitis FAQ -- how to cure yourself (as I did) of chronic sinusitis