From the Desk of The DBeazy One-Man-Think-Tank

I was born too early, I was born too late. Often I ponder such minuscule, yet prodigious statements. As I write this, I’m a mere 57 minutes from my 60^th birthday. Of course, the obvious answer is, “I was born right on time, exactly when I was intended to be born.” I answer in the first few sentences as you see, but where is the fun in that? First of all, that answer is the simple one, the safe one, the one that is vanilla and requires little argument, only acceptance. But the crux of the matter is that my mind simply doesn’t function that way. I ask such questions and I do so in hopes of finding a way to make more sense of this ride we refer to as life.

At 59.98888888 years of age, fuck, man I’m closer to the end than to the beginning. This point is obvious and matters little to me from the standpoint of facing the end. I’m ready. If I look at the sky and see “HIM” coming, I’m not concerned, I’m even looking forward to it, a little. But to quote old Agustus McRae, “It ain’t dyin’ I’m talking about, it’s livin’.” So I ask myself the question, “Was I born too early, or was I born too late?’

I sit here, fingers hovering above keys, trying to formulate thoughts into words and words into meaning. I’m now less than a half hour from my birthday and as added pressure, I’m trying, for the sake of being authentic, to make this post before the clock strikes 12.

I was listening to the Jason Aldean hit, “Big Green Tractor” and for the moment, I concluded that I was born too early. Here is why.

I grew up on a farm. My Dad, my twin brother, and I farmed more than 1,000 acres of Soybeans back in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s. There are similarities and there are differences to the song mentioned. First of all, my father believed in the “Big Red Tractors.” International Harvester was the brand that we used and an argument can be made as to which is better between Green, Red, or Blue, but Avon Earl Bracey purchased Red tractors. The tractor that was “mine” every day was an International 1206. The 1206 had the power to pull an 18 ½ foot disk and carry 240 gallons of herbicide. Small by comparison to the equipment used today, but the old turbocharged gal got a lot of work done.

On the farm, I had a visitor on many occasions, not unlike the character in the “Big Green Tractor” song. In contrast, my visitor drove up in a mid-sixties model Mustang ragtop instead of a “Beamer.” She was wild as a March hare, and she didn’t care if Avon Earl knew that she showed up while I was supposed to be working. My big red Tractor didn’t have a cab. It didn’t have a jump seat, it just wasn’t set up to handle a rider. Often my “friend” would show up, only to find me covered from head to boots in South Mississippi dust, dirt, and grime.  I was embarrassed to be seen like that, but I realize now that it didn’t matter to her.

So in this reference, I’d say that I was born too early. If the same had applied years later, she would have found me relatively clean and operating a tractor with a cab, air conditioning, music, and especially, a jump seat. It would have been fun to have a rider to help pass the time.

Being born later would have held all of the advantages that we experience today with technology and the like. But I’m not sure that would have benefitted me. Seriously, I realize the irony here, being a “Tech” guy and all.

Just as “Big Green Tractor” prompted my thoughts about being born too early, another song illustrates the other side of the argument; “Was I born too late?” The song is Midland’s “Fast Hearts and Slow Towns.” In this song, Midland weaves a tale of a boy, a Silverado truck, a Friday night, and a sun-tanned girl in the singer’s distant memory. “That was the end of our innocence” is a line in the lyrics that resonates with the core of my being.  By the late 1970’s I believe that those of us who are aged 60 or older can say as a collective, our innocence had ended. Sometime in the 1960s, the end of one 2147.5-year period ended and The Age of Aquarius began. (Exactly when one “age” ends and another begins, I’ve found it to be quite a subjective topic and a fascinating “rabbit hole” to enter if one can spare the time.)

Nevertheless, I believe that children should be able to remain children for as long as possible. The song speaks of “slow towns,” but creates the imagery of time as much as it refers to geographical locations on a map. To have been born earlier might have generally extended the period of innocence of myself and others in my age range. I think I could have benefitted by existing in a time when the universe was still an almost infinite and wondrous place. Midland’s Mark Wystrach explains in the song that even though they thought they had forever, “too fast it passed us by.”

In the end, being born when we are born is generally irrelevant. As I ramble on here in the last minutes of October 16, 2023, I consider the world as seen through my eyes when I was a lad of seven or eight years. I think of the adventures that were experienced. I think of how HUGE my grandmother’s house and yard were and how utterly baffled in comparison upon seeing its size as an adult a few years ago. Then there is my view through the backseat window one winter night in the early 1970s. The night was clear, the glass was cold against my forehead, and the vastness of the heavens lay before me. In my mind, I began asking questions, one leading to another, and my very SOUL was catapulted forward and then and there a boy of ten years, transcended beyond what I knew and what I had experienced, and emerged one step before and one step over the line marking the “age of accountability; the age of understanding.”

I’ve considered that night on many of my birthdays, and on each, I’ve reached different conclusions. That night, I paused briefly atop the fence, longing for the safety of one side, yet knowing there was no turning back from whatever lay ahead. Like an infant being forced from the comfort and safety of the womb to the terror of the unknown and the exhilaration of life.

The conclusion I reach tonight at the age of 59.99999998 is that the dawn of the Age of Aquarius might well have coincided with the transcendental journey I made that night in the winter of 1974. It was then that I knew of the existence of God! It was then that I knew that I was on the clock.

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