My Gift to You

I recently had a devastating experience. It haunts me still. I am a member of AARP (Okay, 1 – stop your snickering, and 2 – no that’s not the disturbing experience. Sheesh.) and so receive AARP’s monthly magazine. The front cover of the September/October issue of the AARP magazine (“World’s Largest Circulation Magazine” – Don’t Fuck with the Boomers) features a photo of Bruce Springsteen at full throttle and the appalling headline “The Boss Turns 60.”

Painters turn 60. Opera singers turn 60. Investment Bankers turn 60. Rock gods do not turn 60. Especially not my personal rock god. I first saw Bruce Springsteen in a concert at Memorial Gymnasium at the University of Virginia in October 1974. Memory has tended to embellish that night. I’m sure he didn’t actually play for six days and six nights. Perhaps he didn’t play all of The White Album, Electric Ladyland, Quadrophenia, and Tannhäuser. He did play all of an as yet unreleased album called Born to Run. This is not hyperbole, if someone hadn’t lead me out I would still be standing on the floor of Mem Gym too stunned to move. Which might, I will grant you, have posed laundry issues.

I had never been so glad not to have been high on a Sunday night.

On the walk home I proposed marriage to the senior RA in my dorm. She was from the Jersey Shore and had seen Springsteen back in New Jersey, in the environs of Asbury Park. She went pretty much door to door in our dorm urging us to buy tickets for this concert that wasn’t selling well and featured this guy none of us had ever heard of. She actually said to me, “You will thank me for the rest of your life.” You were right, Cindy, thank you. Thanks too for not marrying me.

Bruce is not the only boomer of some accomplishment, of course. I’d like to give a shout out to two of my acquaintance. (“Shout out!” Who says I can’t keep up with the young people?) Each has a book coming out this fall. (A book! I’m over a year into the same short story.)

I commend to you Denis Lipman’s A Yank Back to England: The Prodigal Tourist Returns (http://www.amazon.com/Yank-Back-England-Prodigal-Tourist/dp/1934848247/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1247347401&sr=1-1). Denis is insane. But I mean that in the best possible way and in the he has produced a really great quirky read way.

Stephenie Overman’s Next-Generation Wellness at Work is as a little bit less light-hearted and would be well-served if you would recommend it to your local public and/or university librarian. Those of you who are employed could also recommend it to your human resources department. I hope to. Some day.

And now for the gift. This is a rule I devised for myself that I am pleased to share with you. If enough of us adhere to it, it could become a national and international phenomenon. Reaching fifty is a significant accomplishment, a cause for gratitude and celebration, but it is also enough. To go any further would seem greedy. I determined that I would reach 50 and stop. Then, with each subsequent birthday I am reversing field. Hence 48-49-50-49-48 … My favorite part of this system is that this year I will be the same age as my baby sister and ever after I will be younger.