So here is another post from the very early days of my blog. Just to keep you busy and so you don’t have to go digging as if you were hunting fossils… not that you shouldn’t do that anyway… because there is some good stuff back there…

This one was called: Aging gracefully… or not…

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I am not so much aging gracefully as I am aging gratefully, which is enough for an old Dead Head. (Sorry about the bad pun). I am still a Berkeley hippy at heart. I went from “where’s the grass?” to “get off my lawn” without missing one beat of the long drum solo. Ha, like anything is that easy…

One minute you are a kid, and suddenly you have kids. The thing is, sometimes you still want to act like a kid anyway.

It hit me, one day when one of my daughters and I were watching one of the Disney movies that has a princess and a prince, that all of a sudden I wasn’t the handsome prince in the story anymore. I was now the fat little King who was trying to get his kid married off, or at least I was in the transitional stage. If you ever see me crying while watching a Disney movie, you now know the real reason…(And you just thought I was sensitive).

Age is such a funny, relativistic thing. Americans came up with the idea that 30 is the new 20, or 40 is the new 30, or some such nonsense. So is 20 the new 10? Is 10 the new rebirth? How far are we willing to go with this? Do we want our 20 year olds acting like 10 year olds? I hope not. On the other hand, who is in a hurry to grow up? Mostly 10 year olds who want to act like they are 20. I think there is an irony there.

To most young people, 51 is old. Like ancient history old. This is how kids see you, once they have concluded that you are old…

Like you can’t take color pictures of me anymore, because it just wouldn’t work…

Then again, this is how my mom still sees me and my brothers… That is me on the left. Why are we all wearing matching shirts? Was my mom going to start a boy band? Watch out, Jackson 5, it’s the Browne 4…

Or maybe, to be fair, she views us as just a little older…

Like at least we can dress ourselves…(and look how good that turned out…what the hell have I got on???)…I am so glad I do not remember those days in Technicolor… Curse you, hand me down sweater…

Obviously this is unfair. My brothers and I are grown men with our own lives, and we can dress ourselves…

Why has the fez not caught on???

And then, there is the way I still see myself…

You are only as old as you feel…multiplied by the number of pills you have to take every night…