Happy Birthday, Colorado

It’s bad form in Wyoming to call yourself a Coloradan, let alone actually be proud of the fact. But I do, and I am. So on Colorado Day, Aug. 1, we’ll celebrate my birthplace.

I’m a native, born at Mercy Hospital in Denver in 1950. Our family pulled up stakes and moved to Washington State in January 1960, then lived in Kansas, and returned (briefly) to Denver for six months in 1964. We then moved to Florida, where I graduated from high school in 1969. I attended college in South Carolina for two years, dropped out, traveled, lived in Boston, and landed back in Florida from 1973-78, moving to Denver after college graduation. Denver, 1978-88, and then Fort Collins, 1988-91, and then off to Wyoming. We moved to Maryland for a temporary D.C. assignment from 1993-95, and then returned to Wyoming where we have stayed for 12 years. We moved three times during that span, but all within the same neighborhood.

My parents were Denver natives, and my son was born there too. I was baptized there, and so was my son. On a cold winter night, I proposed to my wife in downtown Denver after a raucous party. I love Colorado. It’s not, as they say on Oprah, an unconditional love. There are some aspects of Colorado that I can’t tolerate. Tom Tancredo and James Dobson, to name two. There’s the Sand Creek Massacre and the Ludlow Massacre. There’s Vail. And some lousy Denver drivers.

But Colorado’s positives outweigh its negatives. It’s one thing to be born in a place. It’s another to choose it as an adult. That’s what I did, spending 13 years of my working life in Denver and Fort Collins. I made some good friends. Spent time with cousins, aunts and uncles, and other assorted relatives. My wife and I and later our kids camped and tramped all through the mountains.

But it’s not only scenery. It’s the state’s cantankerous reputation and shifting political winds. It’s the way thunderstorms boil up out of the prairie on a July afternoon. Picnics with old friends. Watching the Colorado Rockies get whipped on a summer evening.

On a recent business trip to downtown Denver, I walked from my hotel in the rapidly gentrifying Highlands neighborhood to the shuttle bus stop for the 16th Street Mall. A long walk on a hot day. But as I passed the new Gates Rubber Company HQ near the Platte, I stopped and talked to two women employees taking a smoke break. I told them I used to work at Gates in the 1980s, back when it was a family corporation located at I-25 and Broadway. Through a haze of cigarette smoke, they told me Gates had been going downhill since its purchase by a British company 10 years ago. "You left at the right time," one said.

As I resumed my walk, I thought about that. Maybe that’s what it’s all about, leaving at the right time. But how do you know when it’s the right time? And what if you’re wrong? What the hell. I like my job and I like my life. Would I be able to say that if I hadn’t bugged out?

It was a pleasant morning in The New Denver (see photo). And I'm just another native turned visitor strolling downtown.