The Place
The Dick Clark Studios, part of the Newhouse School’s studio and innovation center, are named for a Syracuse graduate of 1951 who moved back in with his parents in Utica after college, started over in small-town radio, and found his life’s work a few years later in Philadelphia, on American Bandstand. A small-town kid who found himself in Philadelphia. I know that story.
The Idea
I borrowed the phrase from Arthur Brooks. The abilities that make a young surgeon — speed, pattern recognition, steady hands — rise early, peak, and decline. A second kind of intelligence — judgment, perspective, the gift of explaining — rises later and keeps rising. The trick is to step from the first curve to the second in time.
The Last Day
After thirty years of restoring sight in western New York, my last day in the operating room comes in January 2027. I would rather leave while the hands are still steady and the work is still good than wait for someone to tell me it is time.
Teaching
Richard Ambrose, Thomas Gerteisen, and Edward Jaeger each saw something in me before I could see it myself. If the second arc holds what I hope it does, it holds a classroom — and the chance to do that for somebody else.
Two Wheels & Short Grass
More time on the bike, more mornings on the golf course — and longer winters in the Arizona desert, on roads I have ridden many times and never tire of.
The People
Nancy, who carried us through the early years and has walked every step of the road beside me — and now, finally, the time to enjoy it together. Four children with lives of their own, and more time to spend in them.
“For forty years every important thing in my life arrived as a door. This time there is nothing to knock on.”
I call this part of my life the second arc. It is not an ending. It is a jump from one curve to another, and I intend to land on my feet.
The most useful thing I own now is not my hands but what thirty years taught them. Spending that well — teaching it, sharing it, passing it on — seems like the right way to begin.
Look at the photograph again. There is no door in it. For forty years every important thing in my life arrived as a door — significant, slightly forbidding, closed until I knocked. The pharmacy in Bradford. The application to Jefferson. The Match Day envelope. The red door at No. 22.
This time there is nothing to knock on. The way is already open, the light bends on ahead, and all I have to do is walk.
