Getting Old!

I don’t start thinking about my coming birthday until my buddy Jeff’s birthday.

His is today!

Happy Birthday to Jeff Renaldo!

He’s 58 today.

I’m 57 on Monday.

And of course, I revisited our childhood as I wrote The Barking Lions and it simply amazes all of us that we have made it to such an advanced age.

I was 9 when we met.

That day is etched into my memory, and I told it exactly as it happened.

“Mom, they have a man on their team!”

As we pulled up to the little league field.

And there are so many days like that:

Worried about girls, golfing almost every day, going for beers when I turned 18.

We downed shot after shot that night and Jeff had to help me to the car.

“How did you not get hammered?” I asked the next day.

“I wasn’t drinking the shots,” he confessed. “I was throwing them over my shoulder after the toast.”

We were world-class eaters as well.

I think about the night when we ate 8 huge haddock filets cooked in butter and onion.

We were in high school. 4 apiece was just about right. The next night, my poor Mom searched every freezer for that box of fish.

“Me and Jeff are some last night,” I said, finally.

“Where’s the rest?”

“It’s all gone, Mom.”

Kids and work and Bills super bowl losses and camp outs and softball games and about ten thousand beers filled a lot of those days over the next nearly fifty years.

“Damn, you’re getting old,” my son said when I mentioned the coming birthday.

“Fifty years left,” I said.

“Oh Dear Lord,” Jake said. “I’m trying to picture you at a hundred and seven. That won’t be pretty.”

I laughed.

“It’ll go by fast I can tell you that,” I said.

So, we have entered the birthday season.

First Jeff’s and then mine.

Happy Birthday, brother!