50 AND Fabulous
It’s my birthday today and my take on that is that I’m 50 and that’s fabulous! It’s true! For the record my profile pic is now exactly one year and 3 days old and the only thing I consented to reluctantly was having to wear a bucket of foundation under studio lights. I scrub up okay.
I trowelled it off right after the shoot. So, in a fit of retrospective this blog entry isn’t going to beat around the bush. I’m going to tell you what I think were ’50 Great Things That Happened to me on the way to 50.’ The first three are in significant autobiographical order and the next 47 are in no particular order.
1. Josh was born. “It was the Year U2 also produced their fifth studio album they called ‘The Joshua Tree’. The album produced several hit singles including ‘Where the Streets Have No Name’, ‘With or Without You’ and ‘I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For,’ all of which remain classic rock hits to this day.” In this year too, Ken Meredith represented Australia in Mens Artistic Gymnastics (MAG) and later in 1995 joined the MAG Elite Coaching Staff. He became Josh’s coach when Josh represented NSW as an Institute of Sports elite gymnast.
2. Dan was born. He was born on my birthday. The World Wide Web and HTML were created by Tim Berners-Lee and eventually displaced the Gopher protocol. The U.S. animated television comedy series ‘The Simpsons’ became a national and international success as well as the longest-running American animated series. In Australia, there was an implementation of national epidemiological surveys in asthma management practices of children. In the first four years of his life Dan suffered from life-threatening asthma. He’s a fitness fanatic these days and I suspect the asthma condition will have a hard time keeping up with him!
3. Amiria aka Mede was born. It was the year that grunge music made its popular break through too. She’s famously been my muse for at least ’20 Ways to Dispose of School Lunches without drawing attention to the Fact’, not knowing what a ‘nuisance’ was at 4 years old yet revelling in the fact, holding audiences of friends spell bound by stair-songs and being the BEST sister two brothers could ever want.
04. Live theatre
05. Waimarama Beach
06. McLeod’s Daughters
07. High Fidelity, the movie
08. NZ Artist Exhibitions
09. Laptops
10. Red lipstick & Original Oscar de la Renta perfume
11. Early FM Radio in New Zealand
12. Sailing up the Yangtze River
13. Central Coast in New South Wales
14. Smell of sun in laundered sheets
15. Affogato
16. Catch first rainbow trout
17. My father, brothers & sisters
18. A Richard North Patterson book
19. First major painting sale
20. First published poem
21. Flying a helicopter
22. Giving & receiving
23. House played by Hugh Laurie
24. Great N.Z. characters
25. Resourcefulness & Creativity
26. Music & musical instruments
27. African curries
28. Cirque du Soleil
29. Deep Purple Live
30. Imagination
31. Frazer and Mungo
32. Ata Rangi Celebre 1986
33. Friends all around the world
34. On Huangpu River at night
35. Dinner at the Buchan’s in pj’s.
36. Dame Kiri Te Kanawa Live
37. Climbed summits with a view
38. Hawke’s Bay Minors Netball
39. Travelling around N.Z. by car
40. Great Food from around the world
41. Digital Photography
42. Hone Tuwhare reading his poems
43. Duncton books by William Horwood
44. Margaret Smith Trophy for Netball
45. Molly, Banjo, Motty and Furball
46. Sailing under the Sydney Harbour Bridge
47. Family Whakapapa (genealogy)
48. Backstage with Dizzy Gillespie & Miles Davis
49. Freyberg win Margaret Fryer Cup & Jenny Ellison trophy
50. Jan Bishop an outstanding human being
It’s occurred to me that thinking up 50 top notes in a life is just too few in a varied life. So much has happened. This list surprises me actually because it’s based on things that have stuck in my mind and for the most part they may seem so ordinary yet I’m happy with them as far ’50 Great Things That Happened to me on the way to 50′ go.
And while I’ve travelled a lot too, there are memories anchored in the Central Coast of NSW that make it more memorable to me as a location than say, skiing in Aspen, memorable though that was or other parts of the world. Each entry is a story within a story. Some stories I simply remember more.
A goal is good, think I’ll aim for a tidy sum of an age like my old Sunday School teacher Helen Nicholls. She just had her 105th birthday recently! Okay, so I was being ambitious, maybe I’ll be realistic, I’m happy to stay in the moment. The next 12 months is good.
