My father was dying from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, ALS. That’s when he gave me the gold.

I was a 71-year-old straight married man in a glittering red dress, on a bicycle, pedaling 42 miles through conservative California ranching country. It was June 2016.

First astonishment. Then outrage. Mine. I was viewing “California Dreaming,” a 2013 exhibit on Bay Area Jewish history at San Francisco’s eminent Contemporary Jewish Museum.

It was my wife Stephanie who discovered the TSX Challenge. She sent me a link to the website. I scanned the site and shot back, “Let’s do it!”

I was sipping champagne with Stephanie, celebrating my surprising achievement. I had been appointed one of the directors of my agency. At 62, a court administrator enjoying a third career, I had become a boss.

On my first day of law school, in my first class, a civil procedure professor offered some professional advice: “When your client calls, look on your desk at that picture of your smiling kid. Think about the cost of braces. Punch the time clock for billing.”

I was at the top of Manhattan, in the penthouse of Uncle Benedict.

We sat at Joe’s kitchen table arguing, with my tape recorder ready for another interview session. Joe had called our publisher to demand that they replace me with another writer for his autobiography. Mortified and exasperated, I flung pencils at the wall as we argued.

I still call it “the hippie-dippy window.” But almost everyone from that battle is gone. Today, I have to explain this history to younger members of our collective.

It was 1971. I was head over heels in love with a beautiful hippie girl.

Standing on stage behind a lectern, age 24, I watched the auditorium fill with my new students. Two hundred and fifty freshmen. All Black.

“It’s the old white men,” my daughter Julia explained.