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You wake up feeling rested and notice the sky is cloudless, and the relentless sun, as it does every day, ascends over the Eastern horizon this morning over the Atlantic Ocean a few hundred feet from the pillow you’ve been resting your head on the past seven hours after Grottos Pizza and apple pie for dinner last night with friends and family on an outdoor porch.
Your first thought is one of your favorites and it’s elegant in its simplicity: to take a shower, slip out of the house without anyone noticing, and drive your car to a local Starbucks on Ocean Highway to start typing this.
You start thinking about what day of the week it is, the greatest day of the week every week for your entire life, Saturday.
Salacious scintillating Saturday.
You think about today being a day when you can do whatever you want. No work Zoom calls. No deadlines to deliver anything to anyone; they’re not working either because it’s Saturday.
Nothing but you and Saturday morning feeling each other, dancing the tango or whatever dance you choose. You think about your fingers as they dance around these keys and are so glad you have them so you can tap keys and see words appear on the screen that are coming from your head and you notice you are alive. You are a person. You matter, seemingly.
You think about your heart and the fact that it’s still beating six decades after you were born and realize that fact alone is amazing, the awesome sustainability, and unthinkability and wonder of a heart beating for sixty-one straight years and you’ve never done much of anything to make this happen. You’ve just been like riding in a car with unlimited gas in the tank and one that never stops purring. You were gifted a beating heart for free.
You think of your eyes and, again, wonder how they’ve been able to see all these 61 years right up until this second. You have seen with these eyes, from Whit’s boat, the Caribbean-like tiki bars out yonder, sprawling oasis islands amid Bethany Beach Bay. You’ve seen Deauville Beach in Rehoboth Beach, the next town over, at sunrise and sundown and every other time of time, since you were a baby, since your heart started beating.
Sixty-one years ago. Before the turn of the century. Before Saturday Night Fever. Before Rudy became your best friend.
You’ve seen the Rehoboth Beach boardwalk and the orange Dolles sign marking that you are here in the greatest beach town ever created.
Today you are here, a living person, owning a car, having food to eat, a job you like, kids grown up and so much beyond the human beings you could have hoped for – awesome people to be honest — a life having been fully lived, at a phase of life when you take a look at all that’s happened and feel how fortunate you are to have made it this far, to have done what you’ve done, to have been given what you have been given, to have learned what it feels like to lose and win.
You are awake to the meaning of your life, which is that you did what you could, tried to be kind, tried to serve others, and tried to be a father your kids would be proud to tell people “Hey, that’s my Dad,” and truly in amazement that you married a person that is perfect at being a wife and mother.
You are sitting in Starbucks listening to light upbeat music that you can feel connecting somehow with your emotions landing on your mind like a feather. There’s light chatter, the sound of blenders mixing coffee, whipped cream and ice, and other combinations that in your nose smell pleasant, like breathing in fresh slightly salty air on the beach.
You notice others walking in and out ordering their morning beverages, liquids for soul-soothing, and 12-ounce cups of happiness. They know it’s Saturday, too, and are happy about that because they, like you, have a day to do what they want to do at the pace and with the whimsicality of their choosing.
It’s their day. It’s your day. Another week of work stocked away for posterity. However small, they and you made contributions to the world, to the national gross domestic product, to their bank accounts and retirement savings, to business progress, and to helping others.
They got through it and this is now their time to soak in all the richness of a day at the beach with the sky above and ocean and sand beckoning all to come join one of the greatest of life’s experiences: simply, a day at the beach looking at the water and wondering what’s out there and knowing it’s unknowable and because of that comforting because you don’t have to worry yourself trying to unpack that issue. It’s not something that can be figured out and everybody knows it so the answer is to just accept that truth and appreciate what you see. There is solace in not being able to know. You accept and relax more.
All the while you wonder what it all means, this life of yours, how it came to be, why it happened. Will a hundred years from now will anyone know you were year? Again, unknowable so a relief. And it’s Saturday so just relax.
But you know this: You feel grateful for your life being what it is, and what it was, and what it can be in the coming days and years, and how much more you plan to contribute to the world.
You think how often you aren’t appreciative of your life, how you felt more put upon and planted in situations you didn’t like that made you feel life was too hard. And you realize you weren’t appreciative enough of those situations in life that make you stronger.
You’re grateful now, though, and you hope you continue to be. You’ll always be able to reflect on this Saturday when life was more satisfying and exciting to contemplate the wonderful possibilities for you in the future and to just like being in this moment right now, stopping to say thank you in your mind and typing this sentiment now on your computer.
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Sammy Sportface, a sports blogger, galvanizes, inspires, and amuses The Baby Boomer Brotherhood. And you can learn about his vision and join this group's Facebook page here:
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