Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do, so throw off the bowlines, sail away from safe harbor, catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore, Dream, Discover. –Mark Twain
I’ll be 59 next month, which seems much older than it really is, maybe not though.
One reason it seems old is because just six months after my birthday (May 17, in case you like sending birthday cards) I can start taking money out of my IRA, at 59 and a half, not that there’s a bunch there anyway. And it also seems old because I get more solicitations in the mail from AARP and long term care insurance than I do new credit card applications.
This thinking made me a little sad so I naturally pulled up Facebook, which is rarely a good idea but sometimes there is a good video or two. The first thing that caught my eye wasn’t a video but it did make me chuckle. My friend Judge Tim Fox posted that McDonald’s announced they would soon offer “all you can eat fries.” Fox’s comment was good – “... and cue the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.”
I guess after Mickey D’s recent adoption of the “healthier menu” some of their more traditional customers must have complained.
The next thing was a video of a woman at a zoo who dropped her hat into the area between the wall and a big chain-link fence. On the other side of the big fence was a big tiger, which became more than a little interested when the woman jumped down into the area to get her hat back. She grabbed the hat as the large feline hopped around like someone at McDonald’s hearing he could now get unlimited fries.
That hat-dropping woman must have missed the recent story about the poor zoo lady in Palm Beach.
These Tiger stories remind me of the video my son posted of the guy who has a pet Grizzly Bear and trusts him so much that he sticks his head in the bear’s mouth from time to time. As Sweet Brown might say, “Ain’t nobody got time for that!” Someone needs to send that guy a copy of Werner Herzog’s “Grizzly Man” and make him watch it to the end.
But back to me and my race to this 59 milestone. It all began back in 1957, when McDonald’s was already 17. But the big news the month I came along wasn’t even about me but that the Dodgers were leaving Brooklyn for LA.
Or about what happened in a church music hall in Wooten, England, when two teen musicians were introduced. At the time, John Lennon was 16 and Paul McCartney was 15.
Or in September, when Jack Kerouac’s novel “On the Road” went on sale, and NBC introduced their in living color Peacock, and Ike sent troops to Central High School in Little Rock.
Or the story of Laika, a stray dog from the streets of Moscow, who was selected to be the occupant of the Soviet spacecraft Sputnik 2 that was launched into outer space (Poor Laika actually died within hours, which was kept a Soviet secret for 45 years).
Then there were all the other famous people besides me who were born in ’57, like: Princess Caroline of Monaco, Payne Stewart, Osama bin Laden, Spike Lee, Seve Ballesteros, Sid Vicious, Judge Reinhold, Frances McDormand, Richie Ramone, Peter Sellers, Bernie Mac, Paul Kagame (Rawandan president), Caroline Kennedy, Steve Buscemi and Ray Romano.
Something else I discovered was that Eliot Ness died the day before I was born, which may not mean anything, but then again.
Jay Edwards is editor-in-chief of the Hamilton County Herald and an award-winning columnist. Contact him at jedwards@dailydata.com.