When you’re 15 and fantasize about having a chance to travel to see a bit of the world beyond New Jersey, you never think that by the time you’re 50 you will have had the opportunity to visit 25 different countries, let alone dream you’ll wind up living in 5 different countries before you turn 50.

When you’re 15 and people ask you what you want to be when you grow up, you don’t envision that by the time you’re 50 you will have had the chance to be a vast variety of things, including pianist, free-lance journalist, visiting linguistics professor, ESL Teacher, software designer and photographer.

Let’s face it, when you’re 15, it’s just hard to imagine turning 50 at all. So, when you’re 15, you can’t possibly picture how delightfully your life will wind up unfolding, with so many unanticipated adventures to enjoy on the way to becoming 50.

But when you turn 50 — as I did today — it’s wonderful to realize that you can’t imagine how life could have worked out any better.

Now, in a different kind of post on a different kind of blog, I would at this point launch into an introspective reflection on life at 50, full of lessons learned from the past, and thoughts and plans for the future. How all things are possible at any age, etc. etc.

But that kind of post is just not my style.

Instead, I’ve included below a few fun things that I think I would have enjoyed as much at 15 as I do now at 50.

I hope you enjoy them too, whatever your age. 😉

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• A link to the past: My 15 year-old-self used to listen to the cast album of the musical Dear World, written by Jerry Herman. The song A Sensible Woman was cut before the show got to Broadway, and therefore it didn’t make it onto the album. So, it was a delight recently to discover this “new” song from an old show. The lyrics are a real treat — packed with “wisdom, wit and elan”. 😉
• A link to the present: They Just Keep Moving the Line, a standard Broadway show-stopper solo written for the recent TV show Smash. Sounds like a dozen other show-stopper songs, but I’m a sucker for this kind of song myself. So it’s fun to see people are still writing them.
• A link to the future: In lieu of a 3rd Broadway number today, here’s a photo I took this past weekend in Strasbourg, France.  As I experiment more with photography, it’s always fun to try to turn something ordinary into an unexpectedly interesting photograph.

Lemon Fizz, 2013