Last October marked my 15th year on “Good Morning America.” I can’t believe so much time has passed so quickly, how much has changed and how much hasn’t.
Teresa and I have been married more than three decades, and together we have raised two children of whom we could not be more proud. Last night our eldest, Mikkel, turned 26. She’s a hard-working business woman and a loving mother to our only grandchild, 2-year-old Reagan. We celebrated together with a birthday dinner at Ugly Fish in her hometown of Coeur D’Alene, missing our son, Lex, who is spending a year studying at a college in Japan.
At our Almost Heaven ranch 100 miles north, the beauty of the seasons never seems to change, from winter to spring to summer to fall and around again, the seasons changing but time not seeming to move forward year by year. But it does, and Teresa and I well know it as we’ve watched generations of animals — our dogs, horses and cats — grow up, grow old and die, their memories marked forever by the scars on our hearts when they pass and by the stones that mark their final resting spots on the ranch.
Animals have always been part of my life, as you’d no doubt expect from someone who grew up on a working family farm. All our animals had jobs, and we kids did, too, but even then I recognized something more, a special influence animals have on us (and vice versa) that years later I would start calling “The Bond.”
Of all the things now so different since my first day on the set of “Good Morning America,” nothing has changed so much as the ways we use technology to connect with one another. Smartphones, texting, e-mail, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, YouTube — I could never have imagined such things 15 years ago and now it’s sometimes hard to imagine life without them.
I’ve never shied from change. That’s why I’ve once again had this website redesigned to complement not only all the social media I now use but also my role as the spokesman for Vetstreet. Where once my friend John Lofflin worked with me to develop a DrMartyBecker.com designed to stand alone, I now have a site designed to fit like another piece in the puzzle that when looked at whole provides the picture of who we are whether online or “IRL” — in real life, and honestly, it gets harder all the time to see the difference.
This blog, though, is because there are still some places where things just don’t fit, and they are often things I simply do not what to ignore. How many such things there are an how often I do not yet know, but I hope you’ll stick around with me to find out.
