I’ve been thinking a lot about endings recently. The sort … Wait a minute. No. Not those kinds of endings. For heaven’s sake, don’t be so morbid. Sheesh.

Just endings of … things. For example, I was there the day the music really died, at least in my mind, when AM radio ceased to have any relevance for anyone, anywhere.

I grew up with a teeny portable tinny-sounding radio stuck to my ear, listening to rock music on AM stations. When I started working at the AM radio station in Geneva, N.Y., it was still about playing the hits, Top 40 lists, having a big personality, talking over the musical introductions of every song, annoying the heck out of just about everyone, except maybe station managers and other disc jockeys.

By the time I was fired, AM radio was well on its way to becoming what I find it to be today: talk radio for people who like to argue and who would rather hear uninterrupted blah, blah, blah all day, than blah, blah, blah interrupted by an occasional record.

Likewise, my entry into newspapers coincided with the end of the hot-type era. I did work on one paper that still set its copy in hot lead laid out on metal forms that made each page of the newspaper weigh about 75 pounds.

Initially, the offset process relied on punch tape, then moved on to film and, eventually, computers. I was also there for the rise of computers as the way to produce newspapers. I know … that sounds like a Terminator reference.

Wow, huh? History, man. Real “You Were There!” stuff.

On April 6, I ended another 365 days of living in America. That was the date, in 1963, when my parents and I arrived in the United States from Scotland. How long ago was that? Well, Kennedy Airport was still called Idlewild and the reason to change the name was more than eight months away.

We were milling around shortly after landing, waiting for our luggage, I guess, when my dad asked some guy in uniform if he could smoke where we were milling around. I don’t know what the uniform was, but I think it had more in common with the uniforms worn in the cafeteria than it did with any true form of authority. But still, the fellow displayed no lack of assumed authority when he answered, “Sure, buddy. You’re in a free country now.”

Now, I was only 13 at the time, but I knew, right then and there, we had made a horrendous mistake in coming here. My father was concerned with smoking around high-powered jet fuel, but uniform guy seemed to think we had barely managed to scrape our few belongings together and escape before the Queen started demanding our heads. It wasn’t the dumbest thing anybody said to us in our early days in this country; it just happened to be the first.

It was a poor beginning, but in America we were and in America we were going to stay since we couldn’t afford our way home.

Obviously, in the intervening 52 (!) years, this has come to be my home, and everything I love and hold dear is here. I’m proud of my Scottish heritage, but I consider myself an American. At one time, April 6 was a really important date to me. I’m not sure when I stopped caring, but it was a long time ago, probably about the time I put my faith in George McGovern.

This April 6, I was nearing the end of my first year as a stem-cell transplant recipient. What do you suppose the kid who heard the asinine comment from uniform guy in 1963 would have thought had he even the slightest inkling how things were going to turn out? Maybe if the uniform guy had said, “Watch out, kid. It’s a free country, but multiple myeloma is a killer,” that might have been worth something. Still, I doubt it. ‘Cause, who knew?

Besides, as we know, I have no gripes about any of it at this point. My life is amazing, filled with incredible people. When Sheri and I think back to March 6, 2014, getting ready to embark on the great adventure that is dealing with cancer, we see we had little more idea what lay ahead of us than that 13-year-old kid did. All we probably knew was that we were scared, just like he was.

The first day of the rest of my life, indeed.

Jim Arnold is a former copy editor for the Kennebec Journal and Morning Sentinel. To read more about his journey through cancer, visit his blog, findingthepony.blogspot.com.