Heard a kid at the gym say David Lee Roth is his grandfather’s favorite lead singer of Van Halen and took a minute to do the math.
Neighborhood kids introduced me to them or maybe it was during elementary school, hard to remember, easier to confirm their first album was released in ’78.
Easier to remember that some of my fraternity brothers have grandchildren who are teenagers so yeah, it could be accurate.
Heck, conversations among my contemporaries include discussions about how far/close retirement is and comments about plans to move closer to grandkids wherever and whenever they come.
I am not ready to take on that particular title, not yet but I can picture a time down the road and isn’t that a strange kind of acknowledgement of time, place and stage.
But hey, I have lived long enough to have experienced a few things and to acknowledge sometimes you have to submit to destiny.
There are things that I can’t explain that have happened to me that make me raise an eyebrow and wonder if something or someone wants me to have certain experiences with certain people.
Can offer a dozen scientific explanations for why these things happen and am open to being wrong about everything.
Except I am not, I know things.
Important, profound and life changing things.
As well as a bunch of mundane crap.
If I am correct than certain things will happen no matter what I do and opportunities will present themselves. If I am wrong, well it won’t make a difference and I’ll keep doing what I am doing.
Free Will
Don’t mistake any of this to mean I don’t believe in free will because I do. These opportunities that present themselves aren’t without the choice to explore or ignore.
If someone tells you that you have the chance to go wander through the kingdom and see what things look like in modern times you can cross the threshold and take a look or you can wave it off.
Not everything is black and white. Not everything requires a definitive yes or no.
There are chances to walk around and see what life looks like in different worlds, especially when you aren’t worried about having to hit soccer games, parent/teacher conferences and school plays.
That one job you took because it ticked all of the boxes when the kids were little may not tick all of the boxes now and that is ok.
People grow, change and evolve or so we hope. It would be pretty sad if we never grew or changed at all.
In many ways I am more myself than I have ever been but I would add I am certain in some ways I am pretty different from who some people once knew.
Spent a chunk of time explaining some of this to the younger Mr. Wilner and smiling because I remember being on the other side of the conversation.
I remember trying not to scrunch up my face when my fifty something year-old father talked about some of the things he wanted to do.
In concept I understood he had a long life before I came around and he got real responsibilities to deal with but it took a while for some things to sink in.
Maybe it was the narcissism of youth or maybe it was something else, doesn’t matter. Eventually it sunk in and I had no problem imagining him or mom as the people they were before they became parents.
Wondered from time to time how different they might have been in that time before kids as many people do. The younger Mr. Wilner has told me it is sometimes hard to picture me as just a regular guy.
I get it, heck I watched my parents morph into new people when they became grandparents. I still shake my head sometimes when the grandkids talk about grandpa.
They laugh at the stories about how many times I was sent from dinner table to my room. They only partially believe the stories about some of the times I tested my will against their grandparents.
If they only knew.
The future is unwritten and the scroll is unfolding as we go. Been a crazy couple of weeks and I can’t tell you some of what has happened here for a variety of reasons.
But damn, it has been…an experience.
And if nothing else it confirms I know everything and I know nothing.
It is going to be an interesting ride, better hold on to something or someone cuz the fun is just about to start.
Regarding your initial topic, I’ll own up to not knowing who Van Halen was (group or person) until MTV came out. Then again, I wouldn’t have; I never heard any rock music until I went to college in 1977; it wasn’t part of my atmosphere, and I was stunned (and initially disgusted lol) with what I was hearing. I gained some appreciation for it when MTV came; otherwise it was disco or Top-40 music (remember Casey Kasim?).
I definitely remember Casey Kasem. I find it interesting how some experiences are not as universal as we might think they are.
They are more than half a million Jews in LA. We had a large enough presence that in the LA Unified school district I grew up in would pay attention to our holidays.
They knew a large percentage of students and faculty would be out in observance for some of them.
But here in Texas I run into people all the time who have no familiarity or very limited.
And though we were in college at different times neither one of us had social media or anything close to it so unless something was really big it was easy not to hear about it.