It's your song, sing the way you want

Getting older.

They will say it beats the alternative.

Maybe. But when I see those pictures of Mick Jagger strutting his stuff once again across a stage, with the unreal physique of a teenage boy and a face that looks like it has spent way too much time in a Saharan dust storm ... I am not so convinced.

OK, I realize today's column already sounds different than my usual upbeat take on the subject of getting older.

But I hope you will forgive me. This week I turn 58 and I am having "issues."

On my birthday, my mother would reliably tell me that I am wasting my time worrying about my age.

"You have no idea how young you are!" she would say. Lately, I have noticed, she has stopped saying such things. She even admits it: She finds it incredulous that she's the mother to an almost 60-year-old man.

Another thing people will say to people my age around their birthday: This age thing, it's all relative. While it is true that I haven't taken up the hobby of scouring for coins with a metal detector, I do find myself spending way too much time watching the Weather Channel.

I exercise regularly and try to keep my pedometer up over 10,000 steps every day. Yet, when in public, I will vainly pretend that my aching joints are fully cooperating as I put on the act of bouncing youthfully out of a chair.

Perhaps some of this absurd turmoil can be explained by the fact that I am a baby boomer, a card carrying member of the rock-and-roll generation. You know how we are.

At my age, if you don't learn to act your age, it could get ugly. Yet there I was, one recent August night on my feet along with hordes of of the baby boomers, remembering the moves, remembering the love, wildly singing along with Carol King, now 63, her torso thickened by age, her voice still recognizable as she lead us in an exuberant sing-along:

"If the sky above you grows dark and full of clouds, and that old north wind begins to blow, keep your head together and call my name out loud. Soon you'll hear me knocking at your door." Sing it with me: "You just call out my name and you know wherever I am, I'll come running to see you again. Winter, spring, summer or fall, all you have to do is call, and I'll be there. Ain't it good to know: You've got a friend."

It was a deep and familiar feeling, almost tribal, with everyone singing in the dark, everyone knowing the same words by heart. It made me glad to be where I was, the age I was, filled with so many associations and memories.

For her encore, Carol surprised everyone by choosing a raucous rendition of the song "Locomotion." She bounced immodestly around the stage like, well, Mick Jagger.

At one point, she took a breather and rhetorically questioned why she would choose such an unexpected song.

"Why? she said. "Because I can!"

Everyone cheered. On second thought, maybe I have been a bit harsh on the venerable Mr. Jagger. He, and all the others who are not afraid to strut their stuff once again, have something to say to us. Just like Carol King indicated with her high-spirited closing of her show: It's my song, and at this point in life, I will sing it the way I want to!

Thanks Carol, thanks Mick. Thanks to everyone willing to take this journey with me. I think I will celebrate.

Dr. Michael O.L. Seabaugh, a Cape Girardeau native, is a clinical psychologist who works in Santa Barbara, Calif. Contact him at mseabaugh@semissourian.com.