by Larry Brody
Last Thursday was my birthday. I’m not going to go into how old I am. Let’s put it this way – I’m older than I ever thought humanly possible.
I’m so old that time now passes twice as fast for me as it did back when I, erm, wasn’t so old. What I remember as happening last week in fact happened two years ago. What I remember happening five years ago actually occurred ten years in the past.
Actually, my time lapse sense is more subjective than that, which I didn’t realize until sitting down and writing the paragraphs above, and looking at a picture my wife, Gwen the Beautiful, just put up on Facebook.
Turns out that what I remember looking like – hell, make that the person I remember being this morning, as I woke up – in fact existed not two days or two years or even two decades ago but forty holy-crap-racing-like-the-wind! years ago.
Here I am, at the moment when, as head writer-producer (they didn’t call us showrunners then) of the critics’ darlin’ series Police Story, I reached the peak of my climb up life’s all-too-slippery slope.
Since then it’s been a slow but fascinatingly head-over-heels descent down the other side of said slope, and while I’m cool with everything that’s happened along the way, you’d better believe me when I say you’ll never see me shirtless in a photograph taken now!
Those of you who may be curious, however, are more than welcome to listen to the music I loved more than any other kind back in the day, music I listened to last Thursday while realizing it still stood at the top of my list, above even my all-time second fave, The Who’s Quadrophenia.
Here’s Bags Groove, a jazz album featuring Miles Davis, Milt Jackson, Thelonious Monk and a ton more great musicians. It seemed older than God – and maybe even older than I am now – when I first heard it in what then was called “Junior High,” but right now it reverbs through my head as brand new.