There'll be days like this, my mama said

If we go to the pool when it opens, the lifeguards are playing what I assume are"hip," current hits. Most of them give me a headache.

When we go in the late afternoons, they play music I know. In fact, if I start nodding in time with the music or--heaven forbid--sing along, my kids nod to each other, knowingly. "It's an old song from the 80's," they say.

Around dinnertime--they play music I love--music that is just a bit older than I am. It's hard for my kids to fathom that great music was produced before electricity was invented but it's got a beat and they can swim to it. They find it amusing that I know all the words to those songs but I can't remember to bring their favorite beach towel to the pool.

When my daughter gets together with her best friends at the pool and they giggle over a boy, I smile--girls just wanna have fun.

I'm not old. The fact that I can't remember the right towels just means my brain is too full of classic song lyrics. As long as the kids are acting like 10,000 maniacs, if they could compose a little diddy about bringing Hello Kitty and Buzz Lightyear towels to the pool, I would learn the tune and maybe even remember the towels, too!

I'm still fairly young. The fact that my ears bleed when certain lifeguards play mind-numbing noise at 1:00 just means that I have different tastes -- not that I'm ready to sit on my front porch beginning sentences with phrases like, "back in my day..."

I'm not that young. When I spend much of the summer denying this, the universe finds a way to remind me. I found a great parking spot at the pool--which happened to be next to an avocado green Dodge Dart. We entered the pool area and I observed my daughter blush when a boy (same one referenced above) said "hey" to her. The background music the lifeguards had chosen at the particular moment was Don Henley's Boys of Summer.

Sadly, my background song for this summer might be more along these lines.