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Sunday, April 21, 2013

There's a place for us...

...as the song goes.

Not one place, really, but many. The current one, here in Kansas City, does nicely thank you very much.

But last week I was back where I'd spent the past nineteen and more years—the San Francisco Bay Area. San Jose, in the main. I was there for work—and the second of two farewell lunches. My boss' boss had expressed displeasure at not being at the first of said lunches back before the year was new.

No problem. I'm always up for a free lunch—with apologies to Robert Heinlein.

Silicon Valley is a special place—and I don't even mean that in a sarcastic/sardonic way (the way some speak of San Francisco as "our 'special' city.")

There's a palpable sense that anything's possible. I'm quite sure that's true of many places but the place it's truest of for me is Silicon Valley. I had quite the run in the nearly two decades I spent there. I got to work (and still do) with some of the most creative people I've come across. I made, and got to visit with, friends who will be so for life.

For a techie, for such I am, running (in a figurative sense let me assure you) along 101 and finding Oracle, Google, Yahoo, Intel (with AMD not so far away), the Silicon Valley Microsoft campus (wherein they write much of their Apple software) or further afield to Palo Alto and HP, facebook, Xerox Parc (and I worked across the street from that storied place for a year way back when) one can't but get caught up in the possibilities.

I like the Midwest. This very morning I was caught up in a conversation with a young man I'd never met before and am likely not to meet again but we chatted, exchanged views, spent time.

Such is the stuff that makes us human.

But the Valley is also full of the creativity that makes us human also. And it was good to breathe that air again last week.

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