That’s from “EZ Come EZ Go” by Tesla. They were the third nationally-known band I ever saw in concert, opening for Def Leppard 20 years ago this past Wednesday.
My stepsister and her husband turn 45 later this month, he eight days earlier than she. I gave them a little good-natured shit about it last night at Dad’s. I said something about being “firmly and unambiguously in your mid-40s,” or similar. Neither of them had much of a sense of humor about it.
When Lea and I were discussing getting married (in the brutally diagnostic sense, before I actually proposed, which was in my apartment at the time, and it didn’t occur to me until much later that it was incredibly short-sighted to propose to her somewhere we could never visit again, and we even followed it up with dinner at a restaurant that isn’t there anymore, but all of that is another post), I told her that it was extremely likely I would lose my hair to some significant degree, and that I wasn’t nearly vain enough to cover it up in any way, so if she didn’t want to be married to a bald guy, then I wasn’t the one.
She was cool with it, happily.
I was quite confident, on her backyard swing on a beautiful Sunday morning most of 13 years ago, that I would never care about my own baldness. (For the record, it’s not been nearly as bad as I thought it would be, but it’s definitely there.)
I say with even more confidence today that I’m never going to resent my age. Excuse me? What the hell is that? That is absolutely the very last thing you can do anything about. You might as well be pissed off at gravity.
Got regrets? Yeah, me too. I definitely would never have been a smoker, and I would have pushed myself a little harder academically, and I would cut by perhaps half the number of places some parts of my body have been. What do you do about it? Well, don’t fucking do it again.
Don’t walk around mad about yesterday. Just do better today and tomorrow.
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I like this post.
I am often confounded by people who get upset at their age. Like you rightly point out, there’s nothing one can do about that and besides, it’s just an arbitrary number; if we’d worked our calendar differently, we could be 6 or 114 instead of 45.
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I don’t get the whole age thing. May as well be concerned about the orbital velocity of the moon.
I think it’s romantic that you would think about the place of proposal.