Still Out There

It’s fine.

It’s honestly just…fine.

Say what you will about life. Think what you will about the passing of time, about the rotation of the Earth on its axis, of the orbital jurisdictions we undergo as human beings. Gravity has its hold on us, and we are not flung into space. That’s something grand to celebrate.

It just boggles my mind to comprehend that I am 47 years old.

Those precious memories I created as a teenager are becoming distant memories. My hips always hurt. My physical therapist is half my age.

Side note: I did go to the dentist yesterday and passed with flying colors. Small victories for an aging body largely outside most rational control.

So yes. Forty-seven years old.

My mind, thankfully, is not the least bit slow. But each year, I feel the pull of nature just a bit more upon my body.

Damn, but it feels good to be writing again after a brief hiatus.

How about a little more age-related trivia?

If you’re anywhere near my age, you probably have cultural touchstones that feel especially relevant to you. Things that feel timeless, or, at the very least, things that surely couldn’t have happened that long ago.

One of those for me is The Lord of the Rings movies. It feels like yesterday when I was watching them in theaters. But The Fellowship of the Ring was released in December 2001.

Almost 25 years ago. A freaking quarter of a century. A silver anniversary, for crying out loud. Shivers down my spine as I realize it’s now more than half a lifetime ago.

I remember something else that got under my skin years ago. Madonna’s song “Vogue” rattled off a list of old Hollywood royalty. Greta Garbo, Marilyn Monroe, Marlene Dietrich, Marlon Brando, Grace Kelly, Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Katharine Hepburn, Lauren Bacall and the rest. Sixteen people whose names represented a vaunted age of Hollywood.

I read an article about what had happened to that list over time. One by one, the people Madonna sang about, passed. Some were already gone when the song was released, while others lived for decades afterward. Eventually there was only one left, Lauren Bacall. Then, in 2014, she died too.

That was it. The entire list was gone.  And there was something about that which stayed with me. A song released during my childhood had survived every human being it was celebrating. And while I was still there, that particular generation of people had slipped the confines of Earth and were borne into the cosmos.

Bah. None of this is new for me. Even as I was writing this post, my mind wandered to an entry I wrote on June 8, 2002. I was 23. Never been married, let alone become a father. Or a grandfather.

The post was called “Living in the past.” That night, I had watched Lennox Lewis thoroughly dismantle Mike Tyson. I didn’t particularly like Tyson. I didn’t expect him to win. By my own admission, he was a deeply troubled person who probably didn’t deserve the nostalgic affection I had for him.

And yet, watching him lose made me sad, and I tried to figure out why.

I realized then that Tyson was part of my childhood. His name conjured Nintendo games, newspaper headlines and the mythical aura he had when I was a kid. Watching him get beat down and fail to get back up somehow felt like watching a little piece of childhood stay down with him.

Then I wrote about Michael Jordan. Jordan had returned from retirement to play for the Washington Wizards, and I loved it! Not necessarily because I thought it was the wisest career decision (it wasn't), but because one of the permanent fixtures of my childhood had come back.

He could still score 50 points. He could still take over a basketball game. He was still out there. And every time he did it, 23-year-old me felt some small sense of victory.

Then, near the end of that 2002 post, I rattled off a few more examples of my inability to let go of old things. My music lived in the eighties. My favorite basketball player had been drafted in 1984.

And my favorite television show? The Simpsons. Which brings us neatly back to 2026.

The first time I remember seeing The Simpsons, I was ten years old. It was Christmas time, 1989. We were gathered at a family Christmas party at my Mimi and Papa’s condo. At some point, The Simpsons came on television.

And when the parents realized what we kids were watching, they promptly ordered us to turn it off. The Simpsons was taboo. Vile. Inappropriate.

Bart Simpson was disrespectful. The show was crude. In retrospect, it all seems so absurd; I guess the entire moral fabric of America was hanging by a thread, and Bart telling someone to eat his shorts might have been enough to finish the job. The mere fact that the adults were barring us from watching it made it that much more tempting to do so. Hell, I still encounter people who forbid their children from watching it.

For years I’ve carried that memory around without knowing exactly when it happened. But with a little internet sleuthing, it turns out the Christmas episode, “Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire,” aired on December 17, 1989. And it was the series premiere.

Which means there is a very real possibility that my first memory of The Simpsons is a memory of watching the first full-length episode of The Simpsons when it originally aired.

That was 1989. I am now 47. The Simpsons is still on television. Crazy comfort is wrought upon my soul because of that fact. Because unwillingly, but very much so capably, The Simpsons became a little piece of ongoing inertia in my life.

It was there when I was ten. It was there when I was 23, writing a blog post about how difficult I found it to watch the cultural symbols of my childhood disappear.

And even though I don't catch new episodes regularly, or even admit to any sort of anticipation for them, The Simpsons is still here now. And to me, that hits just fine in my heart.

As I am wont to do, I’ve recently started watching The Simpsons again from the beginning. For the Nth time. Well, last night, I reached season 16, episode 8.

It originally aired on February 6, 2005, immediately following Super Bowl XXXIX. The title was “Homer and Ned’s Hail Mary Pass.” The episode featured five established athletes playing themselves: Tom Brady, LeBron James, Michelle Kwan, Yao Ming and Warren Sapp.

When LeBron came on the screen midway through the episode, I was immediately struck by a sense of awe. That episode aired 21 years, 6 months and 8 days ago. Of those five athletes, LeBron James is still playing professional sports.

Warren Sapp retired from the NFL in 2008. Michelle Kwan’s final competitive figure-skating event came shortly after the episode aired. Yao Ming retired in 2011.

Tom Brady, whose career (as a quarterback no less) already seemed impossibly long...finally retired for good on February 1, 2023.

But LeBron James? He’s 41 years old and preparing for NBA season number 24, now with the Philadelphia 76ers.

That right there blows my mind. When this episode aired, LeBron was 20 years old and in his second NBA season. Brady had just won his third Super Bowl that very night. Yao was 24. Michelle Kwan was still competing. Warren Sapp still had years of football ahead of him.

The Simpsons, already considered a touchstone of longevity in and of itself, gathered them together as a snapshot of the sports world of 2005.

But then, the snapshot aged. One by one, those athletes retired. Some pretty quickly afterward. Some stuck around for an almost absurd amount of time. But somehow, LeBron James is still an active professional athlete. And I realized I had been here before, written these words before.

In 2002, I was 23 years old, watching Michael Jordan play for the Wizards and feeling strangely reassured that one of the heroes of my childhood could still step onto a basketball court and take over a game.

Twenty-four years later, I’m doing essentially the same thing with LeBron James. The difference, of course, is that LeBron wasn’t one of my childhood heroes. I was already an adult when his career began.

And maybe that’s what makes this feel different, because LeBron isn’t keeping my childhood alive. That role is filled by nostalgia and pop icons who have aged out completely or were buried far too soon.

No, LeBron's job is much harder; more finely honed and sharp. He’s keeping my adulthood connected. He is a human bridge between a version of me who was barely out of his teens and the 47-year-old whose hips now hurt when he gets out of bed.

That’s an unexpectedly comforting thing.

There are episodes of The Simpsons that make me feel old because the technology is obsolete, the cultural references are forgotten or the celebrities have disappeared. But this one hits different.

The entire sports era it captured has come and gone, except for one guy.

I suppose this fascination with who is still out there has become more personal for me, too.

My dad was born in 1944, and he is still kicking around. My mom passed away in 2024. So did my brother, from complications of diabetes. There are photographs of my own family now that have already started to lose that earthly sense of continuity. People who were once simply there, standing beside us, have become people we remember standing there.

Not long ago I was doing some genealogy work online and found a census record for my dad’s childhood home. It must have been the 1950 census. There were five people listed in the household: my grandparents, my dad, his brother Brent and his sister JoEllen.

Five names. One little household, frozen in place by the federal government in 1950. My grandparents are gone. Brent and JoEllen both died prematurely about six years ago.

I looked at my dad and said, “You’re all that’s left of this record.”

And he is.

I think about that Vogue article differently now. It is one thing to watch a roster of movie stars disappear from a song, or athletes slowly retire from an old episode of The Simpsons. Those things give us a safe way to watch time work. Then eventually you find the census record with your own family on it, or look at a photograph and realize some of the people in it no longer exist anywhere except in memory.

Suddenly the idea of someone still being out there carries a little more weight.

And meanwhile, the television show containing that snapshot has managed an even more ridiculous feat. It was there at my grandparents’ condo when I was ten years old and somebody’s parent frantically ordered us to turn off this dangerous new cartoon.

It was there when I was 23, writing about Michael Jordan and my inability to let go of the past. It was there in 2005, putting a 20-year-old LeBron James into an episode. And it is still here while I sit at 47 and write about all of them.

Maybe that’s what I’m actually looking for when I get nostalgic. It's not a way back; it's perhaps a little evidence of continuity. It is literally something familiar moving forward beside me.

At 23, Michael Jordan gave me that. At 47, apparently it’s LeBron James. He’s still out there, enjoying his life.

The Simpsons is still out there, too. My dad is still out there. And, come to think of it, so am I.

Eventually, every photograph loses its last living person. Every roster becomes a list of names from another time. Maybe that’s why I find so much comfort in the few things that refuse to become photographs without inertia. Not yet, anyway.

Also, I’m pretty sure I’m a 76ers fan now.