As I write this, alone, past midnight on June 12/13, 2012, I listen to an endless replay of Coldplay’s Viva La Vida, a tear welling in my eye, as I see my life passing before me.
For a long time, the song that most defined me was Sinatra’s My Way. Not Paul Anka’s My Way, but Frank Sinatra’s. I know it’s a cliché, and I’ve asked my family never to play that song as an homage to life at my wake. I’ve asked that primarily because it’s a cliché, not because it’s not appropriate, or, at least, wasn’t appropriate.
There was something about Sinatra’s defiance that makes his interpretation of Anka’s lyrics so alluring. Even as a high school teenager, I found myself attracted to the song and, in particular, Sinatra’s stiff chinned version. Sure, I liked the eternal optimism of The Impossible Dream, but that tune, without a definitive version, had only the poetry of its Continue Reading “Ruling the World My Way”
A Parent’s Lament
It’s been a year now since Betsy and I officially became empty nesters. We’ve been told there are two typical responses from new empty nesters: Building a shrine in the suddenly vacant room of their now adult children; or, Reverting back to the hectic social life one had before those same children entered the picture. Or course, if you’re like us and had no social life to begin with, there’s a third way: Be too busy to notice anything.
But I’ll leave the various strategies for empty nesters for a later session. Here the lament of which I speak is akin to the “letting the birds fly” concept. Like peanut allergies, it appears this affliction occurs more frequently today than in past generations. But we need to go back a few generations to identify the Continue Reading “A Parent’s Lament”