Today, May 8, 2023, is an important day to me because two very important people were born on that day, long ago.  Vicki Meryl Forest (now Baker) and Michael Harris Jordan.  Two very different people important for very different reasons.

Vicki is 70 today.  She and her delightful family were wonderful to me during very difficult times.  Unfortunately, in the end, I couldn’t bring myself to culminate the wonderful relationship we shared because of the trauma of the one that preceded it.  Vicki deserved everything I could have given, she was an amazing woman, a delight in every sense.  I know that whoever she’s with today is a happy man, and I’m certain she made a wonderful mother.  I often recall her father Irvin and mother Lucie, her sister Elise and nieces Jennifer and Melissa, and her brother-in-law Saul Sklar, with whom I still correspond from time to time.  I recall them all with a great deal of love.  Vicki was sunshine crystalized, I’m pretty sure she still is.

Coincidently, Michael would also have been 70 today.  He was a fascinating person, the son of my friend and sometimes client, David E. Jordan, a financier of sorts, as was his son.  He was short and stocky and funny and creative and bright, a great chef and a very decent man.  He experimented with all kinds of things during his life, which unfortunately, ended much too soon.  Not that everything in our relationship was rosy and bright from a professional aspect, but that was more due to his dad’s misadventures and to one of his brother’s machinations.  But in sum, it was a privilege and a joy to have been a part of Michael’s life.

It’s a pretty day high in the central range of the Colombian Andes where I now live, close by to a volcano seemingly stirring by the side of a tall former glacier, far from the Islands in New York where I met them both, and the Florida peninsula where I last interacted with them.  But they’re comfortably ensconced in my memories and in my heart.

And they always make the eighth day of May very special.
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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2023; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen).  Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales.  He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review, available at Substack.com.  He has academic degrees in political science (the Citadel), law (St. John’s University), international legal studies (New York University) and translation and linguistic studies (the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies).  However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta and cosmogony.  He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.