I’m 85 years old, but you know that already. I spend much of my time in reflection.

I grew up in the west suburbs of Philadelphia. In 1950 West Chester Pike was a multi-miled, straight-as-an-arrow, four-lane highway, home to commuter bus and trolley lines, which, connecting with the subway/elevated and with Market Street in Upper Darby, would take you directly to center city, to the William Penn statue at city hall.

I would travel West Chester Pike often. On fall mornings, for instance, at every bus/trolley stop for mile after mile there would be a guy in a trench coat, head down, reading a doubled-over Philadelphia Inquirer, with his hair slicked back in a business-type wet look. I saw that guy countless times as a kid. I saw that guy as my future.

That’s who I wanted to be. I wanted to be the cardboard cut-out guy who takes the same bus at the same time every day on the same corner, wearing a London Fog like the guy at the next stop and the next, reading the exact same news as everybody else, living two blocks from his stop in a cute little single home in a large orderly development of cute little single homes, that in the fall has lots of rakeable brown leaves in the front yard, with a pearl-necked wife in the kitchen like Beaver’s mom, and two kids, one named Chip, who wear crewneck sweaters with Ivy League school names on them.

Instead, I owe my long, creative, intellectually adventuresome, societally productive, community conscious, personally rewarding, modestly remunerative life – shared with six sons taller and smarter and a talented wife with her own career – to Presley, Brando and Kerouac.

Edward J. Gallagher

Bethlehem, Pa.