I trot that song out every year around my birthday, too. "My back's a little stiff and there's some lines around my eyes / But I've still got my energy and I've got most of my hair..." Forty ain't like thirty, either. At thirty you come to grips with not being a kid anymore; at forty you realize you can't even call yourself a young man anymore. You have become the guy that young men are expected to call "sir."
Yet forty doesn't seem nearly as old as it did when we were teenagers and ragged our parents about reaching the Big 4-0. We're not entirely out of touch with the world, the way we thought our parents were. We thought the whole world had changed between their generation and ours, but it turned out only to be music and hairstyles. My teenagers refuse to believe that I ever knew what it was like to be young, just as I rejected that idea from my parents. Your boys aren't there yet, but they will be. (By the same token, my twenty-somethings occasionally apologize for their former arrogance.)
BTW, that song goes really well with one that Uncle Rand released a few years later, "The Gods of Men."
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I trot that song out every year around my birthday, too. "My back's a little stiff and there's some lines around my eyes / But I've still got my energy and I've got most of my hair..." Forty ain't like thirty, either. At thirty you come to grips with not being a kid anymore; at forty you realize you can't even call yourself a young man anymore. You have become the guy that young men are expected to call "sir."
Yet forty doesn't seem nearly as old as it did when we were teenagers and ragged our parents about reaching the Big 4-0. We're not entirely out of touch with the world, the way we thought our parents were. We thought the whole world had changed between their generation and ours, but it turned out only to be music and hairstyles. My teenagers refuse to believe that I ever knew what it was like to be young, just as I rejected that idea from my parents. Your boys aren't there yet, but they will be. (By the same token, my twenty-somethings occasionally apologize for their former arrogance.)
BTW, that song goes really well with one that Uncle Rand released a few years later, "The Gods of Men."
By
Joel, at 11:17 AM
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