360 Degrees

Somewhere, in some box, on some hidden shelf, I know the video still exists.

As we roll towards 2015, that video – it’s 30 years old now – would sum things up perfectly if I could just find it: the cyclical nature of life, the way we flow downstream towards some yet unforeseen destiny, the way our children mirror us in ways both large and small.

The year is 1985. I’m rail thin and rocking what my Uncle Bruce lovingly referred to as a bowl job, cut by “Bowl Job Steve” the barber (“That’s the only haircut he knows,” Bruce would say). People are probably smoking in the house as we open gifts. And I am obsessed with my computer, a Radio Shack TRS-80 with a whopping 16 kilobytes of onboard Random Access Memory.

Today, a text message can be bigger than 16 kilobytes. In 1985, it’s what powered an entire 16-pound…