By Maggie Beamguard
Insider Editor
March roars in like a lion and gallops out like a lamb. It’s a month of shifting weather patterns, longer days in the northern hemisphere, jonquils, foreboding Ides, lucky charms and sometimes, but not this time, Easter. Everything tilts on the vernal equinox.
March brings the third anniversary of my first issue of the Seven Lakes Insider. Telling the stories of our community over these first 36 issues has been a great privilege. From fish kills to pickleball, I’ve learned deeply from neighbors, business leaders and readers who make Seven Lakes a special place.
In my mind, it’s fitting that I joined the staff at The Pilot to write for this publication in the springtime. Over the last three years, I’ve grown in appreciation for the place I make home.
March is also the month of my birth.This year portends the approach of a milestone birthday. On March 31, I’ll begin a 12-month advance to the big one. The five-o. Oh.
In the immortal words of those new wave poets canonized by Gen-Xers the world over, the Talking Heads, “How did I get here?”
I’ve got one more year before I’m AARP card membership eligible. When I enter my birth year in an online form, the little popup window makes me scroll back an uncomfortable amount of years. Click, click, click — there they go.
That year was 1976, by the way. That’s right, yours truly was a bicentennial baby, baby.
Roughly each half of my life has been lived in two centuries. That makes me vintage.
Just yesterday I was counting the licks of my tootsie roll pops, looking “Pretty in (neon) Pink,” learning to vogue, pleating and rolling the hems of my jeans, reading “Sweet Valley High,” keeping time with my Swatch watch, crushing on the Goonies, and memorizing the lyrics to every R.E.M. song from “Document.” I wanted an Ewok for a pet.
I grew up on “Sesame Street,” “Captain Kangaroo,” “M.A.S.H.,” “The Facts of Life,” and MTV. I stocked my closet with parachute pants, stirrup pants, Reebok hightops and a Members-Only jacket. It was a “Material World,” after all.
We didn’t use car seats or seatbelts. Vending machines sold cigarettes. The faces on milk cartons of lost children and the undercurrent of the nuclear threat of the Cold War occasionally produced vivid nightmares.
I remember when the Berlin Wall came down and when we lost the Challenger. Those images stick with an adolescent.
I wrote my first paper on a typewriter, my mother’s sage green Smith-Corona. I was 18 before I ever heard of an email. I called my friends on a rotary phone. And there were 24 pictures in a roll of film.
Birthdays can turn anyone nostalgic. And there is a lot I miss about the days of my youth. But the truth is — getting old is pretty great. Even with its nibbling pains, adult-sized worries, silver strands of hair and deepening wrinkles, each day and every year is a gift.
As our nation approaches its semi-quincentennial (say that five times, fast), I approach my semicentury.
I’m not there yet, but I’m tilting that direction with this vernal equinox. There is one more year to go before my golden jubilee. In the meantime, I think it’s time to update my bucket list. I don’t want life to just march on by. I’m ready for the ride and roaring with the Spirit of ‘76, and the month of March.
Contact Maggie Beamguard at maggie@thepilot.com.
