O P I N I O N
NOT THAT PROFOUND
By Nathan Graziano
As you get older, birthdays sometimes cease to be “happy.” Along with the run-of-the-mill physical attrition attached to aging, every birthday also seems packed with this low-grade existential dread that you’ve squandered the best years of your life.
I’m not trying to bum anyone out here; I’m just trying to explain things plainly. On Saturday, I turned 51 years old, which is by no means ancient, but once you hit 50, you’re officially “getting up there.”
And any plans I may have had of kicking back and relaxing on the day of my birth had already been vanquished. My 22-year-old daughter, Paige, was moving back home and had to vacate her apartment in Brighton on my birthday, so my old ass was recruited to help her move in the morning.
Luckily, my stepdaughter and her fiancee agreed to help, so it was a relatively quick move – my daughter is not at the point in her life yet where she has accumulated a bunch of crap.
However, while moving boxes and furniture from her second floor apartment into the U-Haul we rented, I felt every minute of my 51 years, which was confirmed the next morning when I woke up incapable of moving my arms.
In December, I wrote a column celebrating the fact that my wife and I were Manchester’s newest “empty-nesters,” and now this seems disingenuous, but we all know what Walt Whitman said about contradictions, and I am thrilled to have my little girl home living with me again.
We finished unloading Paige’s stuff back into her childhood bedroom and returned the U-Haul at roughly 3 p.m. with the Red Sox playing their second game of the season at 4:10 p.m. and the Bruins starting a “must-win” game against the Minnesota Wild at 5 p.m.
“You know what this means,” I said to Paige.
“Chelbys,” she said.
“Bingo.”
We were also attending the comedy show “Smiles for 26.2 Miles” at The Strange Brew Tavern that night— I had also written a piece about the event for the Ink Link—which left Paige and I with roughly three hours to saddle up to some barstools and celebrate my birthday at the place where I should rightfully receive my mail.
While hanging out at Chelbys, nibbling on some appetizers and small pizza, I barely paid for a beer, with my friends from the bar—patrons, the owners and employees, alike—buying me rounds.
If anything can assuage the aches of aging, it is feeling like you’re appreciated somewhere.
At roughly 6:30 p.m., we called an Uber to drop us downtown for the comedy show, organized by Kyle Heavey and Justin DeFlumeri; the latter is running The Boston Marathon on April 20 and raising money for the Heather Abbott Foundation. All proceeds from the show went to the foundation.
While stand-up comedy is one of the most difficult live performances to pull off, largely due to the fact that humor is so subjective, the soldout “Smiles for 26.2 Miles” was a bonafide success.
I cannot remember the last time I had a true belly-laugh at the live show, and Heavey and DeFlumeri, who also appeared on stage—as well as the other performers Derek Corney, Paul Landwehr, Gigi and Nick Sands—all deserve hat-tips.
It turns out that laughing is another great way to spend a birthday as you age.
All in all, while I can never turn back the clock and repeat the past—Gatsby was wrong—I can still say with some confidence that I’m a pretty fortunate man.