You’re Only as Young as You Feel?
by Jack Guarnieri, Jersey Jack Pinball & PinballSales.com
New Jersey’s own Bruce Springsteen sings in the 1975 song Thunder Road, “So you’re scared, and you’re thinking that maybe we ain’t that young anymore…”
You hear that and you may think about the things you wanted to do, or the things you promised yourself and others you will do. But, it’s really okay to grow older and have no regrets.
A few lines later in Thunder Road, Bruce sings, “You ain’t a beauty but hey you’re all right; Oh and that’s all right with me.” Bruce looked in a mirror, especially in 1975, and he’s all right! Another thought I get from the song is to not let anything – or any season of life – pass you by. Thunder Road is a great song, a hopeful anthem, and really the best Bruce can be as he sings about getting out of your small, dusty town and leaving regret behind. If you have never heard it (is that even possible?) or have never paid much attention to the lyrics, go listen. I’ll wait…
As we age, many things can remind us of a place in time and stir up nostalgic feelings. Certainly, songs can take you back to another place and time, and for a lot of us, music was the soundtrack of our younger years. I remember those “good old days,” especially the ones when it was difficult to lift a quarter-filled cashbox out of a pinball machine!
Anyway, back to growing older. I have a friend, who will go nameless, who likes to climb trees. He doesn’t do this for fun like he probably did when he was a boy – he climbs them to pick fruit that he sells to a nearby restaurant. (So, money does grow on trees!) Recently, he fell out of one! He got banged up badly, but thankfully, by some miracle, he didn’t hit his head, and lives to tell the tale.
While this would be painful for anyone at any age, my friend is 87 years young.
Naturally, I asked him to get someone else to climb his fruit tree from here on out. I hope he now realizes it’s not 1975 and he’s not 36. It’s been said that a you’re as young as you feel, but when you hit the ground you can’t feel that young. According to the internet, here is how fast you would be going after a 10-foot fall:
Speed: You hit the ground going about 18 miles per hour.
Time: The whole fall takes less than one second. It takes about 0.8 seconds to hit the ground.
As Bruce sings, “you’re thinking that maybe we ain’t that young anymore.” There’s truth to that, but how do we hang on to feeling more youthful without doing stuff that lands us in the ER? For me, I’m swearing off cartwheels! What silly thing have you done lately that you probably shouldn’t have?
Age may be a state of mind, but your body has a mind of its own.
Jack Guarnieri started servicing electro-mechanical pinball machines in 1975 and has been involved in every phase of the amusement game business since then. He was an operator in NYC, then began a distributorship in 1999, PinballSales.com, selling coin-op to the consumer market. In January of 2011, he founded Jersey Jack Pinball (named after his RePlay Magazine pen name), which builds award-winning, full-featured, coin-op pinball machines. Email Jack at [email protected].