This is not about the notion of actually choosing to have children 25 years later (than what? than their birth? than you initially planned to?).  I hope, indeed I fully expect that when/if I am so lucky as to be around to see my children — both of them — ripen to the age of 25, I would unreservedly choose to parent either of them, all over again. By then I dearly hope they both would choose the same fate. Only time will tell. I take none of it for granted.

This is instead about a groundbreaking documentary film.

I can still remember the slack-jawed wonder I felt in the movie theater — the UC Theater, to be exact, on University Ave in Berkeley; it’s now boarded up — watching  Choosing Children and realizing with my then-partner (my first sweetie and an integral family member still) that our being lesbians did not at all preclude parenthood.  We thought it did, and each considered this putative barrier to parenthood the only drawback of same-sex love, great enough to be its tragic flaw.  (The heavy, incalculable weight of homophobia was, after all, a tragic flaw of the society around same-sex love. And did either of us have a choice? No, we did not. Love each other, or enter a convent and become lesbian nuns.) Choosing Children showed us that the barriers to our parenthoods existed only in our hearts and minds. Other loving, imaginative people had gone before. A world opened up.

In 1985, when the film was first released, I was in college and had been “out” to myself a whopping three years. Fewer still if you take into account that it took several years of being with my first sweetie to consider that the whole shebang wasn’t just an isolated phenomenon sparked by my (exceptional) love of her. I was not yet out to my parents. I was only beginning to figure out how to “come out” to friends and acquaintances. I think that June might have been the first one my sweetie and I trekked to San Francisco to attend what was then known simply as “Gay Pride.” We went under cover, selling ice cream for the more progressive of Berkeley’s two left-leaning municipal political parties. It was too scary to just plain go as lesbians, something I was beginning to suspect I was, and a word I still found — I’ll say it: ugly. Societally-engineered self-hate: a helluva thing.

I had no queer t-shirts then (imagine it! but yes, true!), and wore instead a racy double-entendre t-shirt celebrating the first American (and all-women’s) ascent  of Annapurna.  Its caption: “a woman’s place is on top.” Sylvester sang “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)” behind me on the San Francisco Pride stage while I stood under my big umbrella, fishing fudgesicles and nut-topped, chocolate-dipped cones out of my freezer and hawking them to the overheated masses. One notable customer was a Chaucer professor at my school, then still in her twenties and one of the youngest hires in the English Department. We locked eyes as I handed her her change: in that moment she recognized me as a student. Neither of us said a word. She wasn’t out; she didn’t yet have tenure.

All of the above color commentary is mere context-setting, though perhaps it may serve also as novel intel for the younger set, or those who forget how very, very different it was to come out a generation ago. Imagine then how very, very revolutionary it would have been to watch a documentary about the pioneering, love- and courage-driven queer people who figured out how to make family when so few of us realized we could. It was if we were in the sixteenth century, and Copernicus pulled us aside and pointed up at the sun.

Last year I attended a fundraiser at the home of queer film curator/archivist-historian/creator Jenni Olson and her partner Julie Dorf. Outfest’s Legacy Project had selected Choosing Children, along with Queens at Heart, for restoration and preservation, and the project needed community support. It was easy to go, and not just because I wanted to clap Jenni on the back and reminisce about the olden days back in Minneapolis when we both had a bit longer hair than we do now. The film really did change the way I thought about my young, queer life. The debt of gratitude I owe filmmakers Kim Klausner and Debra Chasnoff is way, way greater than the modest amount I was able to write on my check. I know there are many, many more like me.

On September 14, the freshly restored film will be screened again at San Francisco’s Herbst Theater at a benefit/gala celebrating its legacy. I’ll be there. With my beloved, if we can get childcare.

Just late last week we’d gone to Little Farm — just what it sounds like: a wee, working farm, with a little bit of everything you’d want in such a place — in the nearby regional park with a school chum of the girl child’s.  So the barnyard’s aural landscape was still crisp in my mind. I had the chicken down pretty well, but the turkey escaped me.  I went back and forth between them, but was continually tempted to stick with the chicken sound, since that one was the one that made me feel successful. Like, Man Do I Have a Cool Parent successful.

Then the girl child casually pawned off this gem: “Baba, if you practice chicken, you’re going to get nowhere with the turkey.”

Well shet my mouth.  Now, whenever I find myself avoiding the shin-skinning scramble up the rough scree of challenge for the comfortable, back-massaging Barcalounger of guaranteed, no-effort success, well. I’ll just try to remember the deathless words of my five-year-old: if you practice chicken, you’re going to get nowhere with the turkey.

No one has lost a tooth in the household as of yet, a matter which brings the girl child no end of grief.

When kid after kid in her Kindergarten began to swagger into class of a mornin’,  gap-toothed and worldly-wise, she started to fret. She asked us why it was that everyone under the sun was loosing a tooth and not her. We told her it was because she was among the youngest in the class if not the youngest, and most kids were losing them at the point one ordinarily does (when one is not a member of a pint-sized after-school fight club, say).  Upon which news she burst into tears.  She’s proud of many of her uniquenesses, but clearly, we discovered on the spot, not this one.  From our standpoint, it’s something to be proud of, her holding her own among her kinda-elders. Clearly we’re looking at the situation from, well, our point of view.

Anyhow, for whatever reason — not tooth loosery on the part of our kid’s, but maybe generosity on the part of another tooth-loosin’ comrade — this sticker found its way into our place and nestled itself alongside a heap of flotsam and jetsam underneath the small work table in our multipurpose room.*

“Baba, there’s an evil train underneath the table!” says the boy child the other day.  He grabs me by a clump of fingers and leads me into the room.

“What evil train?” sez I.

“That evil train!” sez he, pointing to the orange bug-eyed face thingy grinning maniacally from the shadows.

I kneel down, fish it out, and hold it up for his closer inspection.

“See?” sez he, utterly confirmed.

Brief pause, during which Baba’s mind contorts, and… of course. Thomas the Tank engine books –> Diesel  (a frequently evil train featured in one of them) –> same graphic design style as this braggy tooth sticker, give or take a few engineering details –> sticker = evil train.  A hop, skip, and a jump, and presto! I see what he sees, and he makes perfect sense. It keeps you nimble.

*Multipurpose room=Combo Mama home office/Baba home office/kid’s art space/play space. With low, attic ceiling! It’s loads of fun!

Our boychild is now over three years old, and with each passing month his personality shimmers forth with greater and greater brilliance. He adores his sister, plays into her humor, apes — for now — many of her tastes, eagerly looks to master/co-opt what she’s up to.  But I don’t think I am jumping the gun here when I say that he is following in his mother’s family’s grand tradition in one particular trait demonstrated  only modestly by his older sister.  By this I mean that he is, like his mother and her mother and father before him, an A#1, top-of-the-line, dyed-in-the-wool, unreconstructed drama queen.

When I say my in-laws are drama queens I mean that quite literally.  Regular readers of this blog will know that the mother of my children is a youth musical theater director (among many other things); she began her professional theater life right around the time she was getting her first permanent teeth.  Both her parents have spent their entire working lives in the theater: mother a grande dame playwright/director, father an actor/composer who came out as an even grander dame when the beloved was in about second grade.  I like to think of them as the Barrymores of the Great Upper Midwest. Only with a lot more pot, many more beaded curtains, and a Bertolt Brecht-meets-Valerie Solanas urge to épater le bourgeois.

By the time I met him, twenty some-odd years later, the beloved’s dad was ascot-wearing, murse-toting, and proud.   I believe he is constitutionally incapable of delivering any line, even the most quotidien — “Pass the butter?” “Did you get the phone message?” — with anything less than Shakespearean, stentorian flair.  Goddess love him. The kids eat him up like candy whenever he comes for an extended stay.

So, back to the lil’ peanut. Setting aside for the moment the moderating effects of environment (ahem), his gene pool endows him with all sorts of potential, both physiological and psychological, from both sides.  I’ve had the pleasure of knowing the man we call our kids’ Special Uncle — their paternal gene pool guy — since the mid- 1990s, and feel well enough acquainted with his talents and temperament to say that “drama queen” would not be the first descriptor that would spring to mind when one thinks of him.  Nor the twentieth. “Soft spoken, gentle, good-humored geek” more like.  ”Understated braniac,” certainly.  ”Irrepressible imp” under the right circumstances, maybe. Just not, perhaps not even ever, “drama queen.”

So what makes me think the boy child is tilting toward the storied familial tradition of his ma?  It’s not just that our boy memorizes and belts every line from every musical he hears — and he hears a lot — or that he sits, rapt, in any theater, for lengths of time that often exceed the capacities of the grown-ups around him.  This goes double for rehearsals. With his sister, he puts on shows almost nightly, either before or after dinner or both.  Their weekly care from their playwright/director grandma may be abetting this.

But the other day he turned a corner. Showed us what he really has.  Gave us a sneak preview of what will keep the audiences coming back, night after night, to watch to him read from the phone book, the IRS code, you name it.  It took us both by surprise.

He had asked me earlier in the day whether some day we could visit Miguel and Zeca (yes! that Miguel and Zeca!), and I said “I hope so, honey! Might not be for a while, but I’d love to!”  Their mamas are old chums of mine, and next we haul our family unit out to the Twin Cities, an extended stay in their home is on the docket. With or without warning to them, by the way.  The boychild’s request didn’t come totally out of the blue.  Periodically we review one of Miguel and Zeca’s greatest vids, to the point where I think every time my kids see the state of Oklahoma on a map, they begin to hear Miguel’s sonorous boy soprano.

Earlier that day the lil’ peanut had been playing with a puzzle of the United States, dispatching all the states (including OK) with zeal.  Multiple times. Later in the afternoon, when his ma came home from work, he said to her, “Mama! We’re going to visit Miguel and Zeca!” To which she said, “Oh, honey, I don’t think so. Certainly not today.” She may as well have throttled to death his favorite stuffed animal directly in front of his face.

His reaction was immediate.  He yelled, “No, no, no, no!” and faux-swatted at her. She engaged him and — as I was hastily explaining the discrepancy between what he might have expected and what she had just shared —  she encouraged him to continue to express his feelings, but without being physical with her.  He stared in her face, wrinkled up his mouth into a pout, teared up, and thrust his arms forward, which she caught and held.  They went back and forth for a little while, like they were on a see-saw.  She, filled with gentle compassion, he, mute from the bitter sting of betrayal and brimming with pint-sized umbrage.

He continued to well up, but not burst into tears. “It’s okay if you need to cry, honey,” she said. “It’s alright to cry.” Fortunately she checked what I’m sure was the urge to launch into the Free to Be You and Me tune of the same name.  But he said, “No! No talking!” And then he pushed away from her, flopped face down, and prostrated himself on the kitchen floor.  Thereafter he proceeded to scootch himself, forhead plastered the whole time, backwards about five feet, and then forwards another ten. Tiny grunts accompanying each scootch.  Really, it was no mean feat.  I mean, he kept his body pinned the whole time.

The beloved and I met eyes mid-scootch, and valiantly stuffed the mirth back.  Nary a snicker. Maybe a twinkle, though.

When he reached the door of the room he shares with his sister, he drew himself up somberly, opened the door, entered, and slammed it behind him. After some minutes, the beloved checked to see that he was okay.  He looked up at her and said, “No! I want to be alone! I’m reading!” Which he was. Those last two preferences he does share with his sister (alone! reading!).  I just think his sister is not likely to be found behind Stanislavski for the Tot Set.

Margo Channing gets the last word.

The first in what’s sure to be a fitful spring break travelogue.  Who knows — this may be the first and last entry.  But right now I got WiFi and an eddy of time as my daughter makes a windsock in the hotel’s kid’s club!  While the beloved reconnointers the beach with the boy child and her dear friend & said friend’s family.

Basically, Holy Crap, is all I can say.  Yes, I hardly get out, and yes, this is our first time in a hotel with our kids.  And it was chosen by the beloved’s dear friend, whom we met here.  She (a) also has kids and (b) has been here before and has given it the stamp of approval.  Apparently, people do stuff like this.

My goal here, other than to relieve stress from the beloved who the works like a dog — and by “like a dog” I don’t mean the well-coiffed Pekingese kind, I mean the lead dog in the Iditarod kind — has been to be the nicest, friendliest, Spanish-speaking mannish lesbian gabacha the hotel staff have ever had the obligation to clean up after (so far, true to California labor stats, 100% of the houskeeping staff have been Spanish-speaking Latinas).  Sure, it’s hard to tell from a distance, sometimes even close up, if I’m a man or a woman. Whatever. Main point is, I’m kind and I look folks in the eye and talk like we’re all whole complete human beings.

This of course is my general life strategy with everyone I encounter, but it’s no secret that I crank up the charm based on the subtle arrangements of power (and therefore potential for solidarity) between me and others.  Meaning of course, if in any given moment the amalgam of the various social markers on me (race, class, sex, gender ID, orientation, what have you) confer to me a greater amount of social power than you, then quite naturally I’m even more friendly and engaging.  (I’m not saying whether this is always met with a warm reception, or is never taken as patronizing or condescending. I’m just saying that I seem to be compelled.) Oh, also, if you’re in any way evidently queer, and we’re away from Queer Central, then also this kicks in.  And also if you’re brown, and we’re in any way in a place where most white people like me are likely to have been reductive of you, or not seeing you, or any distasteful combination thereof.  Again, kicks in regardless.

You can see this is an elaborate scheme, perhaps hatched by my unconscious years ago, but by now I have noticed it at work and can do little to change it, to level the playing field and connect in a meaningful way. When I’m away from home, I notice it more, simply because with every mile further from home, I launch deeper into a heightened extended experience of my gender non-conformity.  What with my almost always heading to places where there are fewer, not more, gender non-conforming folk.  So on top of everything else at work about solidarity and connectedness, there’s also that.  With every warm connection to another person, a part of me thinks: one small step for mannish lesbian, one giant leap for mannish lesbiankind.  No, I’m not a megalomaniac. Just a goody-two shoes who has developed the same kind of survival tactics as scores and scores of my sistren and bretheren have done before me.

The journey here was beautiful, in the way that my home state always is in the springtime.  The hills, here, just inland from the Santa Lucia Range along the central coast, have that brilliant, only-after-the-winter-rains green.

But after one or two counties of gorgeous, south-bound travel, we were deep in the heart of we voted against your ass country.  (This I know both from that funny feeling I get in my trick knee, plus this handy-dandy map.) So what to you do? You turn on Patsy Cline.

As with all sub-cultures, ours has done as much appropriating as it has original creation.  So Patsy might mean one thing to one cohort, but to lesbians  of a certain age, it means one thing: Desert Hearts.  The first lllllesbian llllllove story we saw on the big screen.  Watched it with my first sweetie in a San Francisco movie theater jam-packed with our people, and daggone there could have been a five alarm fire in the building and not a one of us would have moved a peg. “Ladies? Ladies? We have to evacuate the building!” “Are you kidding? Do you see what’s happening up there on that screen? Do you think we’ve ever seen that before on a movie screen? Now git out the way, you’re blocking my view.”

I go out walkin’
After midnight
Out in the moonlight
Just like we used to do
I’m always walkin’
After midnight
searching for you.

Still, I thought I’d aid and abet.  I got my notice from our daughter’s public school some time ago, saying the census would be coming, and that as a family we should be sure to be counted.

Har! Not our family!  At least not without the cunning strategy most folks are directing toward their tax returns this time of year. I prepared to be irritated.

I also sent away for my handy-dandy “Queer the Census” sticker which I will happily affix to the envelope, with no particular certainty as to its impact on anything more than the schlepp who opens the envelopes.  But at least the schlepp will see that we’re organized, and that many of us are peeved enough to plaster the exterior of our census forms with a gi-normous pink sticker. (I’ve been running a link for it down in the little LGBT civil rights aisle of the sidebar there for months, but if you read this in a Google reader or something, you’ve been missing out. Git yers here!)

Here’s Dana at Mombian, talking about the census in general, Our Families Count’s public education campaign, and how many of us non-bio parents of kids might, or might not, or could maybe hazard a path through the contradictory series of boxes to check.  She and also commenters have given this some good thought.

Last word on this goes to Kate Clinton, who I’m splashing all over the LD home page this week with a slot here plus down in my selected video dealie on the sidebar, which, again, only those of you who read this in situ ever see (no disrespect, Google reader peeps! love ya any way you’ll have me!).

See the subtle arrow point the edges of the truck bed make? Above it is the Golden Gate bridge.

A slight variation on the love poem by Omar Khayyam (trans. E. FitzGerald), whose relevant stanza goes a little more like:

A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,
A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread–and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness–
Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!

For the beloved and me, on a warm enough date night, we add some cheese, grapes, olives, water, chocolate, and a blanket, and skedaddle about a mile and a half uphill from our place, to a parking lot up above Berkeley’s Lawrence Hall of Science.  Prop up two lawn chairs in the back of the truck, pull out the picnic dinner, and watch the sun go down and the city lights wink on in a transformation as gradual as it is breathtaking.

In the springtime, there’s no fog coming in on little cat feet, which is much appreciated.  Wrote Carl Sandburg:

The fog comes

on little cat feet.

It sits looking

over harbor and city

on silent haunches

and then moves on.

Summertime, when that little cat feet fog moves on, it moves due east and settles down for the night right around your ankles, and keeps you nice and chilled.  As all us locals are quick to tell you, whether or not it’s true, that Mark Twain once quipped, “The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco.”

But these spring nights, it’s gorgeous.  You can see container ships pilot underneath the Golden Gate bridge and disappear, eventually, out into the Pacific night. Temperatures in the fifties, perfect for a cozy blanket and a long, meandering conversation with your beloved, the scent of the hillside’s sun-warmed eucalyptus, bay, and sage still wafting in the air.  Just the sort of thing to remind you why you’re so damned lucky, over fifteen years into the journey together.

Or should I say, “Blog update in 20 obscure, often blurry cookie fortunes”?

To make matters reasonable, I am going to pull off the feat of keeping all the answers to Twitter-length, otherwise known as 140 characters or fewer.  For those of you who are not Twitter denizens (Twenizens?), you will see, over and over again, both its strength and its weakness. Brevity: the soul of wit, but also of vast oversimplification.

When kept to this constraint, we can see that sometimes a pithy reply is best.  Many Twiterers (-erers), however, myself included, are compelled to post strings of related Tweets when one won’t do.  Do let me know if you think a thought/conversation ought to be strung out a bit more and we can carry on in comments or in another post.

For context, students were assigned the six-part essay I excerpted here a few years back: “Confessions of a Lesbian Dad.”

Q: Has your brother, brother’s wife, partner’s mother, and spouse adjusted to you referring to yourself as “baba” or lesbian dad?

A: Easy, on the 1 hand: I’ve never been anything else. But family slipped a little 1^st few wks; newbies do weekly. I explain; it all works out.

Q: How old is your child and how is your child handling having a mom and baba? Does the child refer to you by those titles or has the child opted for something else?

A: Girl 5, boy 3. They’ve only known us, so our family’s the baseline reference pt. Gal often calls me Babbi. I try not to think of the kid in The Brady Bunch.

Q: Do you regret not being the one to bear the child or labeling yourself as “baba” or lesbian dad?

A: Never, never, & never. Much to my great relief on all points. I use descriptor “1/2 way betw. a mama & papa” most often. Makes sense to all.

Q:  ”…the more we talked, the more I realized…how clearly the existing paradigms make space for biomom, and biodad. Bio, bio. And then me: nonbio. I was off the radar, legally, socially, viscerally.”  What did the term ‘bio’ mean to you? How did you define it? And did it change after your child was born?

A: Good Q. It meant a ton more before kid than after. But 1^st yr was challenging. Now? Hardly relevant, except in eyes of the law. There? Huge.

Q:  Did you suffer from an identity struggle? If so, how did you overcome it?

A: I’ve not met the queer person my age who didn’t. Closest I got to suicide: 1^st yr in love w/ my best friend. Overcame slowly, w/ community.

Q:  I found it particularly interesting that throughout all of the articles, one main thread that wove the events together was the concept of legitimzing. Whether it was your relationship, your feeling “non-mommish”, the idea Baba. How important do you think it is to express and begin to formulate concepts like the kind you have made recently?

A: H-UGE. W/out sense of clarity re: who I am, parentally, this all might not have been possible, or so easy/rewarding. Me AND kids benefit.

Q: All of these articles resonated innovation of ideas, definitions, and behaviors that go against the ones society is used to. How have you dealt with this in the past before, that has helped you when dealing with something like parenthood?

A: I think it was great that I was very stable w/ my gay identity before parenthood. Faced, won the battles. P-hood requires focus on the KID.

Q:  How has your role as a Baba evolved or grown than what you expected it would be like?

A: I find I’m who I’ve always been, just now the parent version. But I do float in space between straight dads & moms. That’s been interesting.

Q:  What is the toughest part about being a parent?

A:  1. LACK OF SLEEP! 2. Obligation to confront own character flaws daily (ouch). 3. That it’s all so very transient. I love this gig.

Q: How do you express your masculinity and femininity?

A: With as much flair as possible. I feel most akin to an 18th. c. dandy.

Q: Looking at your first blog [ed note: essay excerpt], I noticed that you speak in sociological terms of the concept of gender. Do you have an educational background in sociology?

A:  Why yes, as a matter of fact I do! Ethnic Studies minor + Sociology coursework @ Berkeley. American Studies Ph.D. program @ Minnesota.

Q: Why do you think that humans need to place themselves in categories? What else in your life have you tried to categorize, define, or identify?

A:  Mysterious, but: makes “thinking” simpler. Sometimes helps, usually hinders. As a scholar type I seek to identify & define a lot, & categorize AS LITTLE AS POSSIBLE.

Q: You mention that children are the easiest to explain being a “Baba” to. Who, or what type of people, are the most difficult to explain to and why do you think that is?

A:  Kids lack preconceptions & their biases are gut- & experience-based. Adults w/ disdain for innovation find new ways of seeing harder.

Q: did writing and reading what you thought help you understand something you over saw when u were thinking?

A: Absolutely. Always does. That’s gift #1 of the writing process.

Q: do think the title of “baba” gave you the confidence of being the parent figure or if you didn’t have it you would have been as determined or confident as a mom or dad figure?

A:  Interesting. I do feel like making/using a 3^rd name has ultimately been BRILLIANTLY LIBERATING. Must. Escape. Reductive. Dichotemies.

Q: What is it about the term father that you feel is inaccurate to describe your role and title in your family and our society? Why is it that the term mother needs no alteration or even produces any hesitation in a lesbian-couple family?

A:  The term describes my *role* OK. Lots of mannish lesbians love stretching the meaning of “mom.” More than those who want to stretch “dad.”

Q: Do you think that with the dynamics of what gender is to our society these days that we should re-evaluate all gender-role based terms we encounter in order to better reflect the true feelings behind each person or party?

A:  That’d be nice. Language does evolve with both our conscious & unconscious help.  In the end, we all probably hear what we want to anyway.

Q: What do you think is the most important message your feelings, experience, and explanation of your role as a lesbian dad or baba offer to adults and/or children?

A:  Other than love conquers all? That parenthood betwixt conventionally fixed genders offers both parent and kid a TON. It’s available to all.

Q: What role did a father/father figure play in your life, and how did that influence your perception of parenthood and your identity as “Baba”?

A:  My dad is one of the beacons of love in my life. My mom, now gone, had a bigger hand in daily parenting. Pops sees us both as 21^st c. dads.

Q:  Are you still concerned with verifying your authority to be a parent in the eyes of those who are less understanding of same-sex parents? If so, in what ways do you confirm your authority to them?

A:  Getting my kids to see me as an authority figure is way more pressing. Truly? It all boils down to them, & they love me, hell or high water.

[Ed note: This post is now also over at BlogHer, the über site for women online.]

There’s a story that goes along with this.  Details to be appended to this here post later tonight, after I get the kids in bed.

Long ago, back when people picked up newspapers in their hands in the morning and read them, then put them down and went on with other parts of their day (what a time!), The San Francisco Chronicle used to run a piece called The Question Man.  Somebody – presumably The Question Man – went around town asking folks some interesting question. A column’s worth of the short (Twitter-length) replies were printed alongside a thumbnail photo of the respondent and her/his name, age, occupation, and hometown. Through this we got a pulse-reading from our neighbors on matters great and small.

While I read it regularly – along with Art Hoppe and Herb Caen and later Jon Carroll —  none of the questions or answers were memorable. Except one: “When is a person ‘middle aged’?”  The phenomenon (middle age) was a speck in my distant future, but I took a mild interest in the answers just the same.  Some folks named a year — 30, 40, whatever. Others used some other marker, like “When your marriage is older than your dog,” or “When you are the same age or older than movie stars and national-level elected officials” or some such.  But one really stuck with me.  One woman said, “Middle age is when you no longer apologize for yourself.”

This last definition of middle age has stayed with me as the most compelling, until last Sunday night, when I discovered that middle age is really when you are capable of SPRAINING YOUR FINGER PLAYING AIR GUITAR WITH YOUR KIDS.

Yeah, yeah, I know.  Dictionary definition of “pathetic.” I’ll only add, for the record: it was to Lynard Skynard’s “Free Bird,” and it was worth it.  And this post took me 40 minutes to type.