This coming Thursday I will celebrate 65 trips around the sun, and wow is that ever a kick in the pants. Seems like just last week I was the idiot wearing the Lady Godiva wig and drunk dancing to Haircut 100 music at one of my wild Halloween parties. Decidedly no wiser, I am starting to feel older. So much has happened in the past thirty years, and it seems as if the more complicated my life became, the more out of touch I have become with the passage of time. To all you 20-somethings out there, be forewarned: time has a way of pulling the rug out from under you. Lately, when I look in the mirror, I see Festus from Gunsmoke looking back at me. Where did I go? I lost track somewhere in my 30s. I wrote a song shortly before my 51st birthday, out in Banff in the now famous room #421. It was a forbidding, cold, grey, wet mountain morning, and the wind was howling through the larch trees. I felt some kind of ominous vibe in the air (perhaps I was 15 years too early), and I wrote “The Wind Begins To Blow.” There’s a verse in the song which reads “Lately I’ve been thinking that my time is passing faster, and I feel some sense of dire urgency/ In a month or so I’ll usher in my 51st year, and I’m nowhere near where I thought I would be.” Much has changed in the past 15 years; I try not to “sweat the little stuff” as much as I used to. I also try to avoid that to which I allude in the song; I try not to be disappointed by what I have not accomplished. As I write in an as-yet unfinished lyric: “Sometimes you’ve got to change your dreams before your dreams change you.”
Over the years, Shauna has
arranged two surprise birthday parties for me. When I turned 50, she threw a surprise
party for me at the Oban Inn at Niagara-On-The-Lake, where we first met. That
was the last birthday I celebrated with my mom and dad attending, and there a
lot of close friends and family at that party. It remains one of my happiest
memories. She arranged the second
surprise party for me when I turned 60. I was at the radio station,
broadcasting my Lyrical Workers show, and she secretly arranged for some
friends to hijack me in the parking lot as I was leaving the station. The
problem was, I wasn’t aware that anybody was waiting for me, I lingered at the
station longer than I normally do, and people were shivering outside on a cold
October night waiting for over an hour. I felt terrible. Both of those birthday
parties were wonderful in their own way, but thankfully, I suspect there will be
no surprises this year. Once again, I will celebrate this milestone birthday by
presenting my Lyrical Workers show. It is something I love to do. This week, I’ve
asked my listeners to suggest any unusual birthday songs they’d like to request.
I don’t really have many big regrets
so far. Sure, I’ve squandered some of my time in life’s casino, but who hasn’t?
I was going through an old photo album the other day, and I saw some photos I
have not seen in a long time. One of the positive results of this self-imposed seclusion
is that it has given me ample time to reflect. Last week, we Jews just
celebrated Yom Kippur, our highest holy day of the year. It is a day we fast
and atone for our sins. I am not a religious man, but I take stock annually of how
I have fallen short, and that is a meaningful exercise to me. Everything has
been going too fast in the past decade. In some strange way I am relieved that the
world has slowed down. Now, I am not quite as attention-challenged, and a
photograph of a bunch of my merry pranksters, launching a water balloons at the
Comet roller coaster in Crystal Beach, makes me smile. The guy staring back at me in the mirror might
look like a grumpy old curmudgeon, but the guy inside those eyes is still
waking up the neighbours with loud rock ‘n roll. As my late brother-in-law used
to say: don’t postpone joy.
- Written by Jamie Oppenheimer ©2020 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
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