After working on our story about The 10 Biggest Changes in the United States in Our Lifetimes, I began thinking more personally. So, here are the ten biggest changes in my life, in some kind of ascending (or maybe descending) order:

10. In first grade, I learned how to tie my shoelaces. This was years before Bass Weejun penny loafers became popular in my demographic and made my new skill irrelevant.

9. At the age of 10 or so, I went with my father to my first professional baseball game, I immediately dedicated my life to becoming the New York Yankees’—and major league baseball’s—first left-handed shortstop. 

8. In late 1963, I heard and saw the Beatles, in a TV clip, for the first time, and I clearly remember telling friends that they were obviously a flash in the pan and “no one’s gonna buy that hair.”

7. I started smoking. I was an asthmatic 18-year-old who started smoking the exact same year the U.S. Surgeon General concluded that smoking was a cause of lung cancer and chronic bronchitis and a probable cause of coronary heart disease.

6. I saw the movie “Casablanca” for the first time. It was the start of a beautiful friendship.

5. I stopped smoking, about a dozen years after I started and 12 years after everyone told me to stop and six years after my new wife begged me to stop and several hours after I spent time as a reporter in a hospital emphysema ward.  

4. I became a professional sportswriter, mainly because I liked sports, checked box scores every day, had failed calculus in college twice and wasn’t very much good at anything else.

3. With my wife, I moved to Paris. We did this in an era before the Internet, before Amazon, before FedEx, before satellite television. We had no kids, no car, didn’t own a house and were both writers and thought that with our trusty Olivetti portable typewriter, we could live and work anywhere. We had absolutely no idea what the hell we were doing.

We thought we would stay for a couple of years, until we fully grasped how to use the French subjunctive tense.

2. From Paris, the two city kids who had never lived anywhere but in places that had subways, moved with their infant child to a mountain village in the south of France,  to a 16th-century stone house built into the ramparts of a village of 400 people.

We didn’t know the house had 16th-century stone plumbing and that there would be bats flying around in the rotted rafters of our bedroom.

1. After nearly a decade, we decided to move back to the states. Despite never imagining we could live anywhere but New York, despite an impression of the south formed by TV reports of attacks on Freedom Riders and by the movie “Deliverance,” we moved to the south, to a place where we didn’t know a soul.

We’re still here.