Sunday was my 62nd birthday

Am I young? Am I old?

On the Saturday afternoon of March 24, 1962, while the rest of America smoked their Pall Mall cigarettes and sat around their formica kitchen tables watching Harry Belafonte and Mahalia Jackson on the Ed Sullivan Show, while Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was lobbying President John F. Kennedy to sign a “second emancipation proclamation” into law, and while my jailbird father was sitting in some Irish bar in downtown Philadelphia drinking his umpteenth Schlitz beer, little Marcella Joan Friel compressed her cosmic consciousness into a tiny human body and squiggled her way into the third-dimensional plane.

Happy birthday, baby

I was born in ‘62, and Sunday I turned 62 (that’s about 12 in dog years, by the way).

And I honestly can’t tell if I’m young or old.

On the one hand, when I look at Flo Meiler, a multi-medal-winning octogenarian athlete, I feel like a yawning pup still lolling around in my kennel:

Eyes on the prize: Flo manifesting as Nike, the Greek goddess of victory.

But then, when I catch those tell-tale glimpses of my hands, all I can say is, “The body doesn’t lie, Babe.”

For those of you my age and older, I’m super-curious:

What does (or did) 62 mean to you? Do you feel young or old? Or both?

Or if you’re not there yet, what do you imagine it’ll be like?

Let’s get a conversation going. I’d love to hear your perspective.

I spent my birthday morning in a local cafe yakking it up with friends and townfolk about the historical events of 1962 that the young’uns today have no idea about, and no seeming desire to learn.

About how, for example, 7 months after I was born, the world came precipitously close to its own annihilation—and how a young president and his even younger brother summoned the Herculean courage to stave off the military-industrial juggernaut and its barking-mad doomsday agenda.

Brothers in disarmament: two brave men who held the planet’s fate in their hands.

The hair-raising intensity of those 13 days gave birth, I believe, to a spiritual awakening that compelled JFK to deliver, eight months later, the greatest speech on peace ever given.

A speech so moving that even his adversary reportedly praised and published it widely.

Recollecting these and other early ‘60s phenomena while sipping on my matcha latte, I finally got what makes me a true elder:

It’s not the number. It’s not my wrinkly hands.

It’s that I place a much higher premium on remembering our personal and collective history than I used to, especially as our jackbooted global governance seeks to systematically erase it.

In my younger years I would regard such remembrance as we might now regard a rotary-dial telephone—a charming, impractical vestige of an irrelevant past.

Now that I’ve got fewer years ahead of me than behind me, I realize that I care less about whether the world remembers me when I’m gone than whether the world remembers itself.

The poignant imperative of that impulse, to me, is the mark of a Crone.

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Not only was Sunday my birthday—it also marked one year since I inaugurated this Substack page.

My intention at the start of this endeavor was to treat this platform as my personal Etch-a-Sketch, to scribble freely on the blank screen and then shake the tablet when I needed to take a fresh start.

What I discovered in this past year is that

1. I love writing

2. Writing is crazy hard (and, frankly, somewhat masochistic)

3. These posts never turn out the way I imagined

4. What matters most is creating for the joy of creating, and

5. It lights up my soul when you, my beloved reader, share your responses to my work

In the coming months I’ll be branching into new avenues of expression, including an online course for paid subscribers, interviews with inspiring women I’ve met lately, and a celebration next month of the fifth anniversary of my book. Stay tuned!

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