Hello... is this thing on?
When I was little, I thought I would be
A big comedian on late night T.V.
Well, now I'm (39) and as you can see... I'm not.
Oh Well,
It sucks to be me.
- Brian from the musical Avenue Q
O.K. so in the song he's 32 and not 39 - so shoot me.
But the point is, his dream as a kid, much like mine, was to be famous. I didn't care how I became famous. As a matter of fact, I had two plans for fame and fortune:
Plan A was to be a Major League Baseball Player.
That dream went up in smoke when my parents insisted I use the brand new glove they bought for me for tryouts the day after they bought it.
No breaking it in first. No oil in the mitt. No sleeping on it under my mattress with a ball stuck inside wrapped in rubber bands.
Nope. Brand fucking new.
Needless to say, I looked like a total dope when as a first baseman I couldn't catch balls thrown to me because I couldn't squeeze the glove.
So... there went that fantastical future I had carved for myself.
Plan B was to be a Hollywood actor. Or, at the very least, a Broadway-bound star.
Then I auditioned for a play and was told by the playwright (someone very famous I might add) that I had a fantastic voice for radio and unfortunately I had a face to match.
Until this past September, I went 19 years without being on stage.
Instead, with no more well-laid plans in my cerebellum, I embarked on a blind adventure through heaven on earth, hell on earth, and back again.
Funny how things never go as you drew them up in the dirt at age 13, eh?
Now comes this... this... latest attempt at something unique, at something special, at something that could bring notoriety or could bring total and utter embarrassment.
Either way, I plan on chronicling my final year on earth as a thirty-something.
See, today is birthday No. 39 (thanks in advance for the well-wishes). When I sit down in front of a computer on this date next year, I'll be 40. Really.
Just the sound of that - me turning 40 - doesn't register. It short-circuits somewhere inside a synapse in my brain.
I can't be that old.Forty is middle-aged. Forty is when you lose your hair. Forty is when your body starts breaking down (to be honest, mine started breaking down a long-time ago... It's just that now, it's really gonna go to hell if I don't do something about it).
Forty is when you've been working long enough that you are officially closer to retirement age then you are to the age you were when your parents first signed your working papers.
I'm having heart palpitations just thinking about that.
Hear I am, 12 months from that magical number, 18 months from having a child go off to college and frankly, I'm nowhere near ready for any of this shit!
So, in part this blog is meant to be therapeutic.
But really, it's more than that. It's an homage to someone much smarter than me. Someone with the foresight and the wherewithal to actually do this same thing one year ago.
See, I have a friend. She lives far, far away. I am in the Philadelphia suburbs. She is in Atlanta. I never see her. This isn't sad or depressing though because for 25 years, I never saw her. Never spoke to her. Never even really remembered she existed on this mortal coil.
But then one day, by the strangest of chances, I was sitting on the computer in my parents' basement and I saw her name.
I had the sudden urge, I couldn't say way, but I was driven to find her.
And although I have a few lazy bones in my misshapen body, when I get motivated... watch out. I'm going to see things to fruition.
So, I hunted her down. Now, nearly five years later, we have a bond of friendship that will never be broken.
So, when she started a blog on her own, chronicling her final year before turning 40, I was thoroughly impressed.
For even though we had reconnected; even though I put together a reunion party for her with people with whom we went to fourth grade - 25 years later; even though I went to her daughter's baptism and caught up with her and her wonderful husband in Atlanta a couple times when I traveled there for work, I never knew she was so damn talented with her writing.
In retrospect, neither did she, and we had to have a couple chats along the way where I could offer words of encouragement for her to keep going, but she is brilliant.
Here I am, the writer by profession, sitting in awe of someone who puts words down in print as an erstwhile hobby.
And although she is now less than two months from her D-Day, she has made it so far, and I couldn't be more proud of how vividly and beautifully she bore her soul to the world for the past 10-plus months on her blog.
Then came today.
I got off a plane after being in five cities in a span of 70 hours. I was tired. I was cranky. I was frigging hungry! But I just wanted to go home. It was a shitty way to spend a birthday - alone, and traveling from Winnipeg, Manitoba, to Minneapolis, Minnesota to Philadelphia.
And as I trudged through the airport toward baggage claim, praying my luggage made it back with me since I dropped it off at the wrong baggage area in Winnipeg (it was 6 o'clock in the fucking morning, O.K? I was miserable, cold and tired and I went to the baggage area that said "International Flights." After all, Winnipeg is in Canada and I live in the United States, and crossing that border is International right? No... not in fucking Canada. No. There domestic means flights within Canada and International means flights to the rest of the world with the exception of the United States. But they don't fucking tell you that. No. They make you realize you screwed up after the fact when you go to find immigration and you realize there's an entirely separate area for luggage and terminals for flights to the USA which, in Canada, is not considered International despite the word being derived from Latin meaning between two nations! Damn you Canada!) I turned on my phone.
And there, I had hundreds of messages on social media wishing me a Happy Birthday. How nice.
But one stood out. And it made me stop in my path. After reading it, my luggage could have ended up in Bangladesh, it wouldn't have mattered one iota.
For there she was, again, baring her soul to the world - or at least the 1,500 or so people who are friends of mine on Facebook:
When few came, you showed up.When everyone
else left you stayed, playing run the bases with my brothers and me on
the broken sidewalk of a trolley-track-covered street that most never
dared step foot. When twenty-five years passed, you were the one to find
me, showing me then just how lost I really was. And when I doubted my
abilities, you stood behind me and pushed, with the care of a father
teaching his child how to walk as you
whispered in my shadow, gently... "Baby steps. You'll get there." Today,
I pass the torch to you, or rather, ask you to carry it alongside me
for another two months until my time comes to let it go. Today is your
Eveofforty and the celebration of who you are as a man, a father, a
writer and a friend. My friend. My oldest friend. The one who came and
stayed after everyone left.
Happy birthday to you, Anthony SanFilippo, my oldest friend.
Well, now you know my name.
And now you know, or at least can understand why I must begin this literary journey.
Because I can't let her down. I can't let this idea just come to an end when she herself turns four decades old.
She wants me to take over for her- to keep this concept of being introspective for a full year and make it breathe new life.
How I'm going to do it is the unknown.
When I wake up tomorrow, I'll write about whatever tickles my fancy. I'll try, though, to make sure another little piece of me is exposed with it.
As a matter of fact, I had no idea what I was even going to write today. I finally had a minute to relax and just sat down and started putting this together completely stream of conscience.
But Barbara, that's her name by the way, would want it no other way.
I've always felt in my career that I've had several muses who guided my fingers across countless keyboards typing millions of words for specific audiences.
But I've never had one like this. And I don't know where she'll lead me. But I'm willing to take that leap of faith.
I've read every word of Barbara's blog. She called it Eve of Forty. I don't know if she meant it or not, but I thought the meaning was so very... biblical.
I'm not incredibly religious by any stretch of the imagination. But after reading her semi-regular entries, I thought of what she was doing not as a prelude to turning 40, as the title might suggest, meaning that it's the dark before the dawn of that milestone; but rather I looked at it as Barbara presenting herself to the world naked - much like Eve did in the bible - and did so without shame.
So, I decided to call my blog Adam of Forty, for the same reason.
Look, I know we've both eaten our share of forbidden fruit in this life, and up until this opportunity to share ourselves and our stories, we sometimes hid behind the fig leaves of shame.
But something tells me that's not the way it was supposed to be for us. We were never supposed to be the ones traversing the world behind a protective shroud of secrecy.
We were supposed to be front and center, staring down our own demons and being better for it.
And if we helped others along the way - whether it was by using our strength, our guile, our charity or our sense of humor just to bring a smile to someone's face - then that was just gravy (not sauce).
Barbara took those baby steps, and then she went further and further and further until she forged a path that no one had ever taken before.
Now, it's up to me to follow her trail of bread crumbs.
Until tomorrow...
No comments:
Post a Comment