You know you're getting older when...

You know you're getting older when...

We can each fill in the blank here, and our answers will vary as widely as our personality types. Maybe there's a health topic that you find permeating your advancing years - aging eyes or arthritis complaints. Or maybe you can see your age more and more because of your hair texture or its advancing silver-y color. Or maybe there's that extra 'ring around the mid-section' that never seemed to be there before. Bodies change as we grow older - no doubt about that!

But what about the ways we emotionally view things - everyday things - songs, even? Do those sorts of insights change as we get older? Can a song we've heard many times through our lives seem new once we - oh, let's see here - fall in love, get married, have children, lose loved ones?

...or become a boater?

Well, I can't speak for others, but for me - I answer with a resounding YES!

Case in point: A few days ago, I was almost home from an afternoon of errand-running, when an old song came on the radio. It was Gordon Lightfoot - The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald. That song became popular when I was a sophomore in high school. Throughout my life, I've probably heard it a hundred times. BUT it never affected me before like it did a few days ago.  

I reached my garage about half-way thru G.L.'s storytelling; but rather than gather up my purse and scattered bags, I just sat there in the driveway and listened to the music. I found my eyes beginning to water and my throat closing - as though I was going to cry...?

Through the many years since that tragic accident, Todd and I have watched numerous documentaries about the ship's sinking. We became boaters ourselves. We've spent a fair amount of our summers on Lake Michigan's shores. In 2011, we trailered our boat up to the Apostle Islands in Lake Superior, and spent some time getting acquainted with that vast body of water. It was too cold to swim in in July - can you imagine its temperature in the late fall? (The song says 'the gales of November came early.) As you travel by boat to some of the Apostles' outer islands, and you can't see any land anymore to the north, you get a sense for how scary time on the water could possibly be - on a freezing cold November night in the middle of a storm. The E.F. was only 15 miles from land... tragic. "The church bell chimed, it rang 29 times, for each man on the Edmund Fitzgerald..." Such a haunting custom that mariners practice.

See? It's making me teary all over again!

So as I sat there, no longer 15 years old, but in fact 51, singing along to the song's lyrics I've known most of my life, I tried to process all of my new feelings and experiences of boating.

And I felt changed.

And I think that's okay - maybe even a good thing. Let's hope that life's moments change us - let's hope that as we grow in understanding, our compassion and sympathy deepens.

Otherwise, what's the point?