It's a Wonderful Life

My 13-year-old daughter and I have a little game we play each day.

She takes her lunch to school, so each morning I write a line or two or three from a song on her lunch bag, and she has to figure out the song and artist by day's end.

Yesterday the line came from my favorite Simon and Garfunkel album Bookends (Columbia Records 1968).

The line was "How wonderfully strange to be seventy" from "Old Friends"

It was one of the few she hasn't gotten, and I later learned why: she's not fond of Bookends so hasn't listened to it as much as Bridge Over Troubled Waters and the very early Paul Simon Songbook, et alia...

Dismayed, I popped it into the cd player in the car this morning to show her why she should LOVE this album, only to discover that I had misquoted the line from "Old Friends."

It's NOT "How wonderfully strange to be seventy!"

It's "How TERRIBLY strange to be seventy!"

I fear I am getting old.