Will you still need me, will you still feed me . . . ?

Today is the blog's third anniversary. It also marks (approximately) the third year (not the three weeks it seems like) of my retirement from teaching. In fact, it seems more like three days. I could walk into a classroom right now and pick up as if only the weekend had passed.

And it's my birthday.

I remember the first time I ever heard the Beatles' Sergeant Pepper album. I wasn't at the beach romancing a young woman or anything like that. I was sitting in the theater of the student union building at The University of Texas. Fred Williams and I were there to see whatever free movie was playing that day in the summer of 1967, and the Beatles were coming in on the speakers before the show began. For whatever reason, "When I'm 64" is the song I've always remembered from that afternoon. I was 26 years old, I'd been married two years, didn't have any kids, and couldn't even imagine that someday I'd actually be 64. It's just as well. I'd never have come close to the reality. As they said in a different context in Rolling Stone, what a long, strange trip it's been. Would I go back and do it all over? Sure. It would be worth it just to be 24 again for a while.

My father and I were both born on July 28, and my mother always tried to take a picture of the two of us together. I've posted a few of them on the photoblog.