Everything Ever After

On love, possibility, and Jesse's Girl

One recurring theme in my marriage is that my wife plans for us to do things, I don’t want to do them, I feel a bit dragged along to whatever it is, and then I have an amazing time, and ask her on the ride home why I ever doubt her. Rinse, repeat.

I’ve done this for twenty years. Conservative estimate, I’d say she’s proposed hundreds of plans that I met with a sense of “eh.” She’s very convincing, so I go along, and almost every time it’s better than I thought. Fun, even.

You’d think at some point I’d learn. The problem is, she’s always surprising me with new ideas that don’t sound like anything I’d ever want to do.

Last week, she made a tipsy phone purchase while we were with friends at a birthday party, and bought us two tickets to see Rick Springfield at our local county fair. She told me about it the next morning over coffee.

“Yeah. No chance I’m going to that,” I said. 

She laughed and said, “Come on, it’s you and me. It’ll be fun.”

And so I found myself in the fairgrounds’ outdoor performance area in a folding chair, arms crossed, Emma sipping white wine from a white plastic cup next to me, me vaguely wishing I still drank alcohol. Middle-aged and older folks were filing in, some with signs and Rick Springfield t-shirts, many with other eighties black concert shirts—Def Leppard, Journey, Queen. In this crowd, at fifty-three, I was a relative youngster.

Watching all these people, I wondered how many of them, like me, had been dragged along. I searched their eyes, their expressions, looking for what I was feeling: like I’d have to sit through some number of unknown songs to hear the big hit, then sweet release, back to the parking lot, back home.

A loud, distorted chord rings out. Rick emerges from stage left, wielding a blue guitar in a sort of trenchcoat, and it sounds… shockingly good. He’s singing a song I don’t know, and his voice is like a twenty-five-year-old rock singer, gritty and pure. It’s good. His band is excellent, with a full and rich sound. I perk up.

I’m trying to do the math, remembering the first time I heard “Jesse’s Girl.” It was playing on a boombox in my friend Craig’s back yard. I’m terrible at math, but it was… I don’t know… forty-five years ago? Who even knows where Craig is. I should track him down and tell him I remember that day by his pool, hearing that song for the first time. I’m trying to square all this with the guy jumping around on stage, infused with energy, absolutely bounding, joyful. How old could Rick Springfield be?

“It’s my birthday this week,” Rick tells us, between songs. “Any idea how old I am?” 

People start yelling out numbers. Rick Springfield laughs and tells us.

“Seventy-five,” he says. “You can’t hide anything on the internet.” 

This makes no sense to me. This guy, jumping around, singing with this strong, amazing voice, this buoyant person leaping around the stage is seventy-five?

I see a lot of versions of seventy-five on the ambulance, most of them pretty dire. My own mom’s seventy-fifth year was in 2021, and it was her last, mostly spent in a wheelchair, in memory care.

We all sing “Happy Birthday” to Rick, and I’m suddenly struck, thinking about my mom’s last birthday, her seventy-fifth, where we took her from memory care to a local restaurant for lunch. She was happy. Confused, but happy. 

She ordered salmon, and a whiskey neat with a water back, which I found encouraging, this muscle memory of her former self’s preferences. I then spent the entire lunch trying to stop her from pouring the tiny water pitcher onto her salmon, which made both her and me laugh, a lot, like a little game we were playing. 

“Oh,” she would say each time, and put the water pitcher back down, as if that moment, realizing what the water pitcher was for, was like winning a prize for remembering. It made her giggle. I’d get a few bites in, then no matter where I moved the pitcher, she’d start reaching for it with a shaky hand. We repeated this many times, then Emma, the kids, and I sang “Happy Birthday” to her as she tucked into a ridiculously big piece of chocolate cake, forking it in during the singing. It was the last time I saw her smile, beaming a big chocolatey grin.

Rick Springfield kicks into more songs, good songs that he’s written as a septuagenarian. He tells us before one of them about his depression, which he’s suffered from since he was fourteen, even becoming suicidal at one point.

Watching him, I’m rethinking whatever superficial things I know about him and his career. I’m rethinking what a seventy-five-year-old is, and can do. I’m some combination of baffled and inspired.

Of course he closes with the song, and of course it’s great, a full eight minutes of everyone on their feet belting out many choruses along with him. He sounds incredible. 

But before that, Rick Springfield comes into the crowd, walking up and down the aisles, high-fiving and posing for selfies, fist-bumping, and beaming his seventy-five-year-old grin. He leans over and fist bumps me with the mic in his hand. He strikes me as someone who’s defined a new kind of seventy-five, full of energy and love, and—if I had to come up with a single word for it—generosity.

“I love you all more than you know,” he tells the crowd after “Jesse’s Girl,” as we are all filing out, buzzing with what he offered up over ninety ecstatic minutes. 

We meet our sixteen-year-old daughter and her friend near the exit, where they’ve been waiting after their night at the fair. “Holy shit,” she says, “We heard that last song, and it sounded amazing.”

Emma looks so happy as we walk back to the car, no “I told you you’d love it,” which she never does, come to think of it. I feel bathed in her generosity, too, putting up with the silly charade I make us go through, every single big idea she plans for us. 

“Thank you for that,” I say. 

Am I suddenly a Rick Springfield fan? I think I am. I’ll never hear “Jesse’s Girl” the same way again, that’s for sure. It’s still a super-catchy song about wanting what you can’t have, but in that way pop songs take on additional meaning after a break-up, or a memorable road trip, say, it’s now something more for me.

It’s about how you never know what’s ahead, what love might be out there, waiting for you.