This is where my head is at right now: the Beach Boys' classic of teenage love and longing. I don't know why, but the little toy-piano-calliope-sounding tune at the beginning always makes me want to cry. I remember the way Michael Moore used this song in Roger and Me over a montage illustrating the lost hopes and dreams of people in Flint, Michigan. Heavy irony, anyone?
I'm thinking (and writing) about the way in which, in midlife, I have become a lot like a teenager--constantly changing, prone to hormonal surges, wondering about my future, alternately exuberant and discouraged, despairing and hopeful, impulsive and cautious, foolish and wise. Lately, I have been talking to my parents a lot, leaning on them for advice as I haven't done since high school, when I subjected them to a nightly litany of my hopes and dreams and insecurities, and they struggled to comfort and counsel their complicated and perplexing eldest child. How lucky I am that they are here for me as I navigate these treacherous seas.
4 comments:
I've gone through similar changes over the last half dozen years. I found myself, in my 40s, in changing roles in regard to being a parent... in my relationship to the world at large, and to myself. Kind of funny how that works... not ha ha funny necessarily, but curious.
Some might call it a mid-life crisis, but I don't buy that. It hasn't felt like a crisis. Just change...
Thanks, MacG. "Midlife is not a crisis." Hmm....where have I read that before?
Carl Jung?
Perhaps, or maybe Carl No-Longer-Young. I hear he wears his baggage gracefully :)
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