Growing up, and especially in my 30s, I always knew that middle-age was coming. I also knew some of the more obvious ways that I’d know I was getting closer to it. Inevitable or just predictable, I knew that I’d encounter at least some of the following: My hairline (not exactly flattering to begin with) would creep up. My belly (again, never six-packed) would spread a bit more than I’d like. I’d spend fewer nights out on the tiles until dawn, and more evenings at home watching ‘Alf’ reruns. All of these things I expected – so when they started happening I knew that I was no longer approaching middle age, I was there. They were so obvious, so blatant… it was as if Nature had put up a missive billboard on the highway of my life that said ‘Stop kidding yourself.’
Unbeknownst to me, though, dear, sweet Mother Nature has also been putting up smaller signs, too – reminding me of my mortality in more subtle ways, just in case I missed that great big billboard. I've finally seen those less obvious hints, and there are at least two areas in which I'm now aware of my advancing maturity.
Music
Music may seem like an obvious one. But this isn’t music in the ‘I don’t understand how kids can listen to that crap’ kind of way. This is ‘modern music makes me react differently than it probably should.’ And it’s not that I’m not identifying with this music – I quite like some of the stuff in the charts – it’s that I don’t think I hear what some current artists want me to hear when I listen to their songs. For example, when I hear Eminem and L’il Wayne’s new song ‘No Love’, I’m sure they WANT me to think of tough, urban kids growing up and making it through some incredibly challenging times. What I actually think of is this:
Sport
I still consider myself decently active. I am getting back into going to the gym regularly, and I still play fully-kitted American football against guys who are (literally) half my age. I’ve got two Defensive MVPs under my (expanding) belt this season, and have been reasonably happy with my game so far. Having said that – I expect to be hurting more and for longer now than I did when I played in my teens, 20s or even 30s. Approaching (and going past) 40, I knew I’d be a bit slower on the field and a bit quicker to feel injury. So I’m not at all surprised that all of those things are now true. But yesterday I played a round of golf in a collared shirt and chinos. The fact that I’m playing golf at all should have sent up all kinds of red flags about my impending retirement, but when you couple that with the fact that was in goddamned CHINOS and a polo shirt?? You might as well pass me the Ovaltine, because it’s 230 in the afternoon and time for bed. Chi-fucking-nos. The worst bit? I had brought shorts and a t-shirt to change into after work, and I CHOSE NOT TO. Woe. Is. Me.
Even though I’m sure I missed a few of these over the years, your birthday is one of the times when I miss you most. Especially on a day like today, when the sun is shining and my little Peni is so full of what you called ‘hootzpah’. I can only imagine that she’s a lot like you were when you were this young – I only have the one photo of you as a child (about 7, I think), but she has the Gillespie five-head, our wispy sandy-blonde hair, dimples and looks so much like me that I’m certain that she’s got only your genes on display. I know you see her and look over her, but I sure as Hell wish you could have met her. I know that being a Grandma was something you wanted desperately and it will always be one of my biggest regrets that I couldn’t give you that before you left. Still, she’s here and I’ll make sure she knows everything about you as she grows up.
I’ll be meeting up later with Carol and planting another tree for you this year. The olive tree we planted when we moved in to the house didn’t survive the combination of last year’s harsh winter and the cats deciding that it was a litter box, but the cherry blossom and apple trees are doing well. I wonder if Peni will bring in cherry blossoms for Carol, like I used to when I was younger, coming back from my paper route (while Drew was saving the neighbourhood from ne’er-do-wells).
I think I miss you most on your birthday because sharing your 56th was one of the last things we did together. I still have that picture of you, me and the cake. Typically, the chocolate sponge was lovely, but it looked like it had been frosted by an epileptic octopus using a builder’s trowel during an earthquake. True to form, you reassured me with a soothing, “I’m sure it’ll taste lovely” – the same five words of genuine kindness that you offered every other time I’d made a pig’s ear out of one meal or another. Presentation was never my strongest suit. I like to think that you were happy then – whether it was from the cake or the morphine, I’m still not too sure. You were smiling, though, and that’s all that matters to me now. Hard to believe you died less than three weeks later.
Fifty fucking six. Sorry, I know how you hate swearing. I remember how determined you were that wouldn't say 'that sucks' because it was so vulgar. But it really was criminal… and SO unfair. But then, when I used to whine that something wasn’t fair (probably something completely insignificant and brother-related), you always replied ‘Who ever told you that life was fair?’ What a shame that you had to be so right.
I’m determined to make this a happy day, but it’s hard. I miss you. I would love to share with you whatever I’ve manage to achieve so far by work, luck or grace (probably more of the last two than the first if I’m honest). On days like today, with the smell of freshly-cut hay on the slightly salty breeze drifting lazily up the Rheidol Valley, and with the garden just about to give up her gifts, I sometimes indulge in fantasies of you spending your summers here with us, with me, with Peni. They are powerful, poignant indulgences that often come to a halt all too quickly when I remember things like the striking fact that this is not your 62nd birthday but the commemoration of a birthday that could have been – that really should have been.
Please don’t worry – I am not bitter, nor am I often this morose. You have taught me enough to know that life is for the living; a lesson that, along with many more, resonates daily with me and with your happy, vibrant and very Gillespie-looking granddaughter here in Wales. No, I can’t complain that I’m normally this emotional when I think of you. But today, especially, I want you to know that I miss you and wish you were here. Happy Birthday – we all love and miss you very much.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately – but two things have really focused my mind this past week. One of them was a blog by a friend of mine, about my age, who talks about how fun fun runs are when you’re a middle-aged man. The other was a rather humiliating gym ‘session’ with one of the players of the American football team I coach here in Aber. When I say humiliating I don’t mean in the same sense that I unwittingly disobeyed some homophobic gym etiquette, or urinated in a bin; I was just miserably incapable. I can just about overlook the fact that I am (literally) twice this guy’s age. I’m almost able to convince myself that my creaky knees, bad form and achy back are the result of the football game I played two weeks ago, not the 30-years of physical abuse I’ve put my body through or, more accurately, the last two years of neglect that have seen my fitness atrophy and my ‘wabs’ multiply ('Wabs', if you don’t know, is the wholly scientific made-up word that an ex-girlfriend used to have for my then far less considerable love handles. Don’t know why it works, but it does). I could almost overlook all the millions of excuses and nachos that I’ve been feeding myself over the past 5 years or so as my commitment to my fitness has slowly but surely dwindled. Almost.
A bit of background first. I recently had this brainstorm to try to get more guys from the football team lifting. The squad here in Aber is a strange beast – with a few exceptions, university sport in the UK is a social concept. There is no overriding corporate, personal or financial incentive for anyone to be a standout college athlete. So what you get is a club usually formed, run and coached by students, who get together once or twice a week to practice and three or four times a week to get drunk. ‘Tarannau Aberystwyth’ is no different: it is populated by a group of people who love the sport (you have to love American football in this country to stay involved because it is NOT easy), but on the whole show very little of the discipline it takes to be consistently successful at it. Like I said, you can’t blame them, really: the culture that collegiate sport is important simply does not exist in the vast majority of UK tertiary education. The problem is that it DOES exist in some universities, and the ones that have grasped the idea that you have to work hard to be successful are jumping out by leaps and bounds ahead of the pack of mediocre teams (like us). What college gridiron in the UK needs most is an understanding of how that basic concept works, and to be educated en masse on how that synergy between preparation and execution is realised. And what that takes, more than anything else, is discipline. The invention of the early morning weight lifting club was an attempt to promote the simple concept that lifting the right weights in the right way will make you a better football player.
Instead of an eye-openign session for any player, what that first, short, easy session turned out to be was a massive wake-up call for me. I tweeted after the session that ‘Your lies to yourself about your fitness become all too obvious when you lift with a friend’, and I think that sums it up pretty well. All of my gym sessions to this point (both of them, anyway) had been so much less than what I was capable of. It was too easy to convince myself that 6 reps was just as good as 8, and that I didn’t REALLY need to do that last set. Lifting with someone who (by their own admission) was just getting back into the gym and who was STILL shamefully so much fitter than me really brought home the reality of where I am. Fortunately, it also reminded me that going to the gym can be a fun, social thing – and that has made me look forward to getting in the weight room with the team as a unit come September.
I wrote in an earlier post that I wasn’t very competitive. Looking back, I think that’s probably a lie. A competitive person doesn’t care whether he or she succeeds. I do care. I really care. I HATE losing. So I don’t think that I lack competitiveness – I’m pretty sure that what I lack is discipline. It’s the discipline to do the work that has more recently been my biggest obstacle to success. And I’m getting to the stage in my life where it will become increasingly more difficult to blag my fitness, or to rely on residual fitness from years of active sport. I’m guessing this new club for the players will be as much for me as it is for them, and I can’t wait to get started.
Today's blog is brought to you by the letter 'C'. Now, C can be for a lot of things (including 'cookie', which seems to be good enough for this dude), but the first C we're going to talk about is Camping.
Maybe it's my Boy Scout upbringing, maybe it's the fact that I was raised in the Pacific Northwest by family and friends who were 'active', but when I think of camping, I do NOT think of this:
I think of this:
Of my last two experienecs camping, I endured one of the former, and enjoyed one of the latter. A few years back, I had the misfortune of 'camping' on the Gower Pennisula near Swansea. When I hear 'camping' I think of a quiet, contemplative time spent with friends, nature and not much else. What I GOT (on that particular occasion) was a plot in the middle of a farmer's field with 300 other people getting hopped up on cheap booze - which, somehow, made everyone able to 'play' the guitar, throw a frisbee and/or perform fire-based circus tricks (sometime all three at once).
Contrast that, if you will, with my most recent US camping experience: Yellowstone National Park. Maybe unsurprisingly, there were more people at Yellowstone than there were at The Gower. We had to book our campsite over a year in advance, and on the second night enjoyed five-star dining at one of the park's three hotel restuarants. But we stayed in a tent. Surrounded by people, we felt completely alone. We saw moose, deer, and came close enough to a buffalo that I could smell its breath (to be fair, it could probably smell mine, too - I forgot to pack a toothbrush). That, to me, was luxurious camping... but it was far closer to camping than you can ever get here.
Camping is not convenient. Camping is not clusters of confluence, cramped together like cattle. Camping is only marginally comfortable. Camping is challenging, casual and chilled. It is uncongested countryside, campstoves and cold showers, not crowds of inconsdierate cuntwaffles consuming crates of cider before crashing into your crudely constructed canopy, sending your canned chili cascading down the front of your clothes.
It may not be cool, but I love camping. And that is good enough for me.
After yesterday's post, I got to thinking about July 4th and the annual gamut of questions that I usually get asked about this time (and at Thanksgiving). I guess those two holidays are especially American, or (at least), Americans celebrate them differently – more American – than anyone else. Anyway, as the sun was shining, my mind was dipping in and out of patriotic tunes and I'd already sent all my ribbing texts to my Welsh friends who have yet to experience what a successful war of independence is like, I had the opportunity to stumble across this little gem from my childhood:
Now, anyone who grew up in the States in the 70s or 80s is probably familiar with Schoolhouse Rock. These were short films, originally aired on ABC on Saturday mornings between 1973 and 1985. Apparently inspired by a dad who noticed that his son was having problems with his times tables, 'Multiplication Rock' kicked everything off with the unforgettable 'Three is the Magic Number' (later famously sampled by De La Soul, of course). Most of us remember the big ones: The Preamble, I'm Just a Bill, Figure Eight, Conjunction Junction, Lolly Lolly Lolly Get your Adverbs Here, Elbow Room, The Great American Melting Pot and of course the psychadelic, strangely sexy disemobdied cyborg head of Interplanet Janet. (Just look at her: pouting mouth, purple fro, retractable arms and shiny tin-plated boobs! No wonder she's so popular with all the young rocket boys.) I mean, c'mon…these were burned into our brains, week after week, and because of this I know that I'm not the only one who can recite the Preamble to the Constitution by heart (only if I sing it, though) and tell you that when you get an injection in the ass, you use an interjection like 'Hey! That smarts,' or 'Ouch! That hurts!'. Schoolhouse Rock accomplished the seemingly impossible: to teach kids important stuff without them noticing that they've learned it. It's like hiding vegetables in spaghetti sauce – it doesn't matter how the stuff gets in there, as long as it sticks.
What's most surprising to me – and I bet to most people my age - is that Schoolhouse Rock returned to TV for another six years between 1993 and 1999. What on earth could they possibly talk about? The original run covered all the basics – math, grammar, (American) history, science… surely they could just digitally re-master these classics and our kids would get the jump-start they needed to keep us out of the educational gutter? Well, they could have done that – but they didn't. Instead, they came up with brand-new songs, about more contemporary issues. So, between '93 and '99, you get the unforgettable classics like 'Dollars and Sense' (talking about interest and loans), 'Where the Money Goes' (paying bills), Tax Man Max (paying taxes) and my personal favourite: 'Tyrannosaurus Debt', putting the 'fun' back in 'public funding deficit'. WTF? How is any of that stuff useful? Maybe some would argue that it's more useful than anatomy or parts of speech. Maybe it's just noteworthy that Schoolhouse Rock was absent in the 80s, and the offerings of the 90s were destined to address the backlash from the soul-sucking Me Generation. Maybe ABC just decided that teaching kids how to write a check ('The Check's in the Mail') was more important than teaching them about the importance of innovation (Mother Necessity, 1977) or Women's Right (Suffrin 'til Suffrage, 1976). But it seems to me that SHR, like so many of the kids they are singing too, just grew up too fast. This film terrifies me... but maybe that's the idea...?
Yes, we need to know practical things. We even need to know about current issues, which is why I guess I'm glad that SHR went all Greenpeace on our asses when it came back AGAIN in 2009. But I can hear the development talks as they decided which tact to take this time: "Let's see, we've done grammar, math, science, and history. Then we scared the shit out of them with all our talk about debt, and inflation and paying bills. What can we do now? I know, let's cheer them up with cute little ditties about Global Warming!". To be fair, the latest batch of SHR seems to be back on a positive note. I can imagine watching 'The Trash Can Band' and enjoying teaching my daughter about the importance of recycling, or sitting down together to watch 'Don't be a Carbon Sasquatch' and learning all about carbon footprints. The problem, though, is that I can't. 2009's SHR was a straight-to-DVD job, meaning that the chance of my kid (or anyone else's) ever seeing it are about as probable as me forgetting to Unpack My Adjectives, or ever unlearning the fact that the function of a conjunction is hooking up words and phrases and clauses. Bring back the basics, says I. Cheques (or "checks" back home) are being phased out of the British economy by 2018, but as far as I know we'll still need nouns, verbs and all the numbers (even Naughty Number Nine). Whatever else is happening in the world, prepositions will still be busy, and gravity will still be making victims of us all. How do I know all of this to be true? Because Schoolhouse Rock told me so, 35 years ago.
Before you read on, please don't misunderstand me: I really do love America. Just because I choose to live somewhere else doesn't mean I'm not proud to be an American citizen. But when you Google 'What is America famous for' and one of the top answers is 'fat people', you've got to wonder what the world thinks of us - especially if you ARE an American who lives overseas. Last Friday, my wife's school hosted an 'International Evening' to celebrate the end of term and the opening of their new extension. This evening was set to show off the best of what the school has to offer, both in terms of brand new real estate and its surprisingly diverse student body. Thanks to an eclectic mix of parentage (which is, in turn, thanks to an eclectic mix of having a hospital, a University, and lots of lonely farmers); this small corner of Wales nestles in its bosom children from India, Norway, Thailand and everywhere in between. The school's International Evening was a chance to put on display the very best of these places. So, from the Italian room: fresh pasta, pizza and tiramisu. From India - deep, aromatic curries, poppadums and samosas. The Chinese room had fragrant stir-fry, egg rolls and fortune cookies. Kids in kimonos popped up with elegant sushi rolls dipped in soy sauce and wasabi. Magical… and delicious!
It will probably come as no surprise that somehow, by some incredible stroke of cosmic fortune, my wife's class was assigned to be the American room. So... what was the best that America had to offer? Well, my idea of dressing everyone up as gun-toting LA street gangs was quickly dismissed, as was my suggestion of scattering fake dead buffalo all over the room. When you’re asked to come up with an American ‘theme’, it kind of begs the question: what is America famous for? Freedom? Diversity? Bad grammar, particularly interrogatives ending in prepositions? Apparently, the students of Plascrug Elementary School define 'America' with two things: sugar and aggression.
The aggression thing was actually kind of cute, in a brainwashing kind of way. Several of the girls had organised themselves into a band of cheerleaders, complete with skirts, pom-poms and a routine to be performed in front of the school. Sounds cute as hell, right? Well, it probably would have been: they were enthusiastic, and the French girl they got to do about a dozen back handsprings down the middle of the group was pretty impressive. The problem was the 'cheer'. To me, as physically demanding as cheerleading can be as a sport, I've never understood the concept of the cheers themselves. Whether it's rhythmic spelling or 'inspirational' one-liners, I just don't get it. As a player, I can guarantee you that I've never been on the pitch, heard someone spelling 'DEFENSE' and thought... 'Right... NOW that I know how to spell it, I am really going to twat that dude'. It just doesn't work. So the cheers, for me, are always a problem. But this one was different. These girls had obviously never seen cheerleaders cheering - it was clear that they learned their cheer from watching the Olympics, or Ryder Cup, or some other event where the US gets to show off its pride (and ironic xenophobia) by incessantly chanting U-S-A, U-S-A, U-S-A over and over and over again. That's what these girls were doing: hair in pony tails, smiling from ear to ear, happy as Larry to be bounding all over the rubber-coated tarmac - screaming U-S-A at the top of their lungs like meth-fuelled, weak-beer swigging patriotic lunatics. To be fair, I think they got that one spot-on.
Case in point #2: sugar. Instead of the highly-cultured fares offered by the other rooms, the USA room was a sea of gooey stickiness. Where Italy had pasta, we had pancakes and maple syrup. Where China had bok-choi, we had chocolate chip cookies, jars of 'Fluff' marshmallow spread and Double-Stuffed Oreos. For every poppadum you could find in India, we offered a handful of butterscotch popcorn. And instead of sushi, we served up sourdough pretzels. And to wash it down? None of your pompous continental coffees here thank you. We'll have gallon after gallon after gallon of Coca Cola and Dr Pepper. And the real kicker? We were FLAT-OUT full the entire two hours. Kids, parents - even some family pets - were absolutely stuffing themselves on this crap. They couldn't stop eating long enough to say 'thank you' - entire mouthfuls of Fluff were being washed down with Dixie cups full of Dr Pepper, only to make room for the next bucket-load of popcorn. Secretly, I smiled, knowing that the new brand of American imperialism isn’t in conquering continents with military force – it is in making sure that the rest of world can’t find the energy or the breath to fight back. And it seems to be working. If we Yanks can't out-think, out-wit or out-gun you, we'll take you down with us in a hypoglycaemia-induced coma. Europe, you're welcome.
To close, I'll offer a couple of the most honestly American songs I know of. First, this one by Lee Greenwood, which talks about all the (valid) reasons that Americans should be proud, and presents it in such a way as to reinforce everything that is good and cringe-worthy about calling the USA home.
And then this one, by Trey Parker: no less honest and funny as hell. I don't think being American means I have to choose one or the other. In fact, 'being American' is defined by the fact that I can see both sides, and I have the opportunity to see both points of views expressed in song. God Bless America, indeed.
