On a recent afternoon skim through my Facebook feed, I read that Fred Penner is coming to town.
Like any good Canadian child from the eighties, I have entrenched memories of Penner strumming a guitar, crawling through a log, and relaxing in the forest with a couple of puppets and one bird with an expansive vocabulary. A distant memory in a repertoire of televised Canadiana; firmly placed somewhere between Mr. Dressup and the Polka Dot Door. He was a friendly face of my formative years, one I gradually left in the forest sometime in the early nineties.
You’ll understand then, why I found it deeply unsettling to read that Fred Penner has been dubbed “Mr. Multimedia” by Billboard magazine.
It’s odd to read that a relic from your childhood is not only not where you left him (Saturday mornings decades ago) but is alive, kicking, and current enough to be something as forward-thinking and technological as “Mr. Multimedia”. Knowing that a man in the forest with an acoustic guitar has followed me into the 21st century, makes me feel simultaneously old and irrelevant.
It’s a feeling I have been having a lot lately. I just turned thirty and like it or not, the milestone forces some moments of deep reflection.
My twenty-five-year-old friends tell me I’m “taking it well”. Like the three-decade marker is some sort of terminal diagnosis which I should acknowledge with tears for a good life lived, and resign to fading away into the background, joining all the washed-up elderly folk on the wrong side of thirty.
In a weird sort of way, I never thought I’d be thirty. It’s not that I thought I’d die young, it’s just that somehow thirty was always a marker in the distance.
There have been signs that the years are starting to pile up behind me. On the positive side, I threw out my college sweatpants, bought a house, and paid off my student loans. I make my bed. I’ve come around to olives. On the more alarming side, my favourite jeans are high-waisted, I recently tried to buy a cover-up for the beach (only to see that coverups that actually cover anything had product reviews exclusively from the 36-44 age range. I couldn’t do it), and I feel both confused and repulsed by current fashion “trends” (ugh...crop tops) while I desperately seek out staple, quality items (do you have this in grey?).
Like all those who turned thirty before me, I keep reminding myself that I don’t feel a day over twenty! Until, that is, I spend any time with a bunch of twenty-year-olds. Then I feel like I’m forty.
Like any good Canadian child from the eighties, I have entrenched memories of Penner strumming a guitar, crawling through a log, and relaxing in the forest with a couple of puppets and one bird with an expansive vocabulary. A distant memory in a repertoire of televised Canadiana; firmly placed somewhere between Mr. Dressup and the Polka Dot Door. He was a friendly face of my formative years, one I gradually left in the forest sometime in the early nineties.
You’ll understand then, why I found it deeply unsettling to read that Fred Penner has been dubbed “Mr. Multimedia” by Billboard magazine.
It’s odd to read that a relic from your childhood is not only not where you left him (Saturday mornings decades ago) but is alive, kicking, and current enough to be something as forward-thinking and technological as “Mr. Multimedia”. Knowing that a man in the forest with an acoustic guitar has followed me into the 21st century, makes me feel simultaneously old and irrelevant.
It’s a feeling I have been having a lot lately. I just turned thirty and like it or not, the milestone forces some moments of deep reflection.
My twenty-five-year-old friends tell me I’m “taking it well”. Like the three-decade marker is some sort of terminal diagnosis which I should acknowledge with tears for a good life lived, and resign to fading away into the background, joining all the washed-up elderly folk on the wrong side of thirty.
In a weird sort of way, I never thought I’d be thirty. It’s not that I thought I’d die young, it’s just that somehow thirty was always a marker in the distance.
There have been signs that the years are starting to pile up behind me. On the positive side, I threw out my college sweatpants, bought a house, and paid off my student loans. I make my bed. I’ve come around to olives. On the more alarming side, my favourite jeans are high-waisted, I recently tried to buy a cover-up for the beach (only to see that coverups that actually cover anything had product reviews exclusively from the 36-44 age range. I couldn’t do it), and I feel both confused and repulsed by current fashion “trends” (ugh...crop tops) while I desperately seek out staple, quality items (do you have this in grey?).
Like all those who turned thirty before me, I keep reminding myself that I don’t feel a day over twenty! Until, that is, I spend any time with a bunch of twenty-year-olds. Then I feel like I’m forty.