Did you catch it? Spring, I mean. It’s come and gone a couple of times here in the US as winds roaring coast-to-coast sweep it away. It returns on tsunamis of air that must be circling the earth. Proof that time flies. It’s like Groundhog Day has become Groundhog Winter, followed by Groundhog Spring, followed by Groundhog Winter, followed by etc.

Always wondered if Groundhog Day meant you could be immortal. Might be monotonous, but what if you didn’t change? And nothing around you changed? Eternal sameness. What a price to pay for immortality. Much better to seize life as an unpredictable adventure than to devolve into something which merely exists, stuck on repeat. And yet, we fear aging so.

You can always think young, and thinking is what distinguishes us from things that never change. Turning 30? 40? 50? 80? 100? So what? Did you think you wouldn’t? It’s a number in the Betty White school of calculus, as I wrote on Facebook last year. Grey hair, wrinkles. 9 billion humans have graced the Earth since Time declared the current model. Another hundred years give or take and everyone making noise on the stage just now will be silent – histoire! So, it’s natural, and it must be OK to age. But you DO get to choose the road (travel advisory: do not take the expressway).

Me, I don’t intend to ever get old. Oh, I’ll go silent, as we all must. But I won’t be an empty vessel filled every day with fears and guilts and whatever cultural pap is trendy. Maybe I’ll age a little on the outside – a little. Enough so you would dismiss me out of hand. Geezer. Irrelevant. Which is okay, because I’ve been dismissed before, one way or another all my life, and the dismissers ate my dust. Whole generations of people who were much younger than me are now older than me. So, go ahead and pass me. Far as I can see, the myths of aging are mostly self-fulfilling prophecies. We give ourselves up to sedentary lives and a lack of contemplation. We stop growing, learning, and become organic lumps, consuming calories that go nowhere, letting the accumulation of life’s little dissipations cannibalize our functions from inside out. And all those declines are voluntary. I’m still growing up inside, still celebrating snow, sun, sax and nature. Perspective is my Grail.

Just now my perspective is on Mom Nature…through a peephole. She’s a shameless Madam, you know. Puts on an X-rated show every Spring. So, I painted my window red with a peephole for watching the testosterone-crazed male squirrels chasing females for three days until exhaustion puts them in tandem. Then it’s the ducks with the drake waddling awkwardly after the femme fatale until she makes up her mind as to a nest site where maybe he can get down to business. Drake: “What was wrong with that one?” – “Where are you going…that was perfect!” Waddle, waddle.

Don’t even ask about the rabbits.

And then there are the spiders. You just never see them chummy up together in the same web. Wham, bam – thank you, ma’am! And that’s if she doesn’t eat him for lunch or wrap him up for the kids to snack on later.

Anyway, welcome to Spring.

Got a couple spring cleaning items to add from things I’ve shared elsewhere. The first is a gift from Norway – an over-the-top collectible book exquisitely photographed of Eagles lore, and – even if you don’t read Norwegian – a cultural treasure for music lovers in general and Eagles fans in particular. Prominent skier, musicologist and author Jan Fredrik Lockert traveled the globe researching concert stops and musical connections (even has a couple of mentions of me in the book) in order to produce EAGLES: DROMMEN OM CALIFORNIA (Eagles: The Dream of California). I first met Jan ten years ago when he had a publishing company and flew me to Oslo to speak at the House of Literature (not to mention, I got to ski the course at Holmenkollen during the world ski championships!). I’ll segue this into the photos and videos to close:

Photo #1 the coffee table book. Photo #2 skiing in beautiful Norway. #3 Jan with Henry Diltz in his North Hollywood studio – Diltz was the official photographer of Woodstock and is the world’s go-to photographer for all things rock ‘n’ roll whether legendary musicians or fabled happenings. And while I’m on that, for those following the Eagles, Glenn’s oldest son Deacon Frey has left the band to try his fully fledged wings, though with an open door to perform with them in the future. Here are a couple photos I took of Deacon. #4 Deacon on a weekend spent with the Freys up at Cross Lake, MN. #5 Deacon and I playing basketball in a courtyard of the Frey’s Brentwood home in 2016. And the last item of Spring cleaning is for those who have asked to hear me on the T-sax. When my friend Tony Tremblay nudged me, I dug up a video clip from a dozen years ago, made before I realized I don’t have the knowledge or the equipment to make a decent recording. No one would mistake me for a musician, but I hope I’ve improved a good deal since then. Mostly I go for bad-ass rock ‘n’ roll, though this one happens to be a bit more serene. In any case, putting my soul through brass is my catharsis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SACMaonBjLI

Thomas "Sully" Sullivan