October 5th, 2017. My 48th birthday.
Hey! Wait a minute…. You mean to say that I’m 48-years old young today? Impossible. I’m a Count Chocula connoisseur. An Ultraman geek. A comic book nerd. A PS4 dork. I couldn’t possibly be someone with the big Five-Oh on the horizon.
And yet, I’ve grown accustomed to listening to the creaks and cracks of getting out of bed every morning and the inevitable gray or missing hairs I see whenever I look into the mirror. Reading glasses have become the norm for me now and summers are often spent resisting the urge to tell young children to get off my lawn.
Seriously, wasn’t it just yesterday that I was the youthful teenager driving my beat-up, old Toyota to the mall on Friday nights after school? Pouring my lawn mowing allowance into video game cabinets at the arcade while drinking gallons of Orange Julius and wishing I could muster up the courage to go talk to the cute girl who stood with her friends in the Listening Booth record store?
Wasn’t I the one who could go to rock concerts and then stay up to the wee hours of the morning talking to his friends about what would happen when we took on the world and made our dreams came true?
This song always makes me stop in my tracks whenever I hear it.
As we’ve seen with the hurricanes and Las Vegas tragedy along with the untimely death of one of my idols, Tom Petty, we’re only given a certain amount of time on this bouncing ball. My goal now is to try to make every moment count.
But I’m not here to bum you out on my birthday. Because in addition to being the one who drove to the mall and went to rock concerts, I was also the one who consistently laughed at his parents for being in their 40’s while I reveled in teenage glory.
There’s an odd sense of immortality you have when you’re young that makes you believe time will always stand still and that you’ll never be as old as your parents. But then you take a nap and wake up in that role.
What was it they said about karma?
go.Jimmy.go 
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