Time Goes By

First, updating our top story from yesterday: Hummer's gonna make it after all! Okay, maybe a little bit too excited, but there will be a save of about 3000 jobs for the soon-to-be-ex GM brand, as a Chinese company has agreed to buy the obnoxiously fuel-inefficient minivan on 'roids line. Drinks at the Backer are on Rick Wagoner.

Moving on...a few things happened this weekend that made me feel old. Or more accurately, they made me acutely aware of the fact that I'm getting older, like it or not.

First, my sister got married this weekend in Chicago - gorgeous weather, wonderful ceremony, perfect union, wild and crazy after-party for the reception (and really, would the Heidkamps do it any other way? Of course not). I even tried to add to the specialness of the moment by educating the wedding party on the parallels between the wonderful adventure the happy couple was embarking on and the moving lessons of Up. I'd say the response was mixed between, "That was very sweet" and "pass me another beer."

The specialness of the occasion, and the fact that two more good friends from college are getting married this summer, while a third close buddy from high school is already married (and welcomed his first child) kind of hit me hard with the knowledge that - hey, ready or not, here comes the big stuff. For the longest time, big life-altering stuff like marriage, having kids, moving to far-off places (or better yet, trying to lock down a career) seemed a dozen worlds away. When I was 10, which would place me in the year 1995, maybe I'd think off to life as an adult some twenty years or so from now, but it was a pure fantasy. 2015? Yeah, sure, 2015 will be here one day. We'll all be flying around on HoverBoards, hydrating all our food, and we of course will no longer need roads. If only that were true. Then you turn around one day to find 13 years have passed, and we're probably not gonna be zipping through the sub-stratosphere in our HoverCars (dang!), but all those seminal moments that were out in the distance weren't that far after all. They also tend to pass by pretty quickly, so make sure to pay attention.

Another milestone got touched when Jay Leno signed off of The Tonight Show Friday. Now, since I'm not 63, the evening news and a touch of Jay are not regular appointment viewing for me; I can truthfully say I've never watched a completed episode of any late-night talk show, unless one includes The Daily Show on Comedy Central. But I do remember Johnny Carson and the passing of television's most famous comedy flagship from him to Leno, more vividly because of the Cheers episode that aired right around the transition which featured Cliff Clavin's gloriously stupid attempt to get one his jokes read by Carson on the air. (For those who don't remember, Cliff wound up in jail, and his mother hammed it up on Johnny's couch.) I was a young kid when that happened; now I'm a college graduate watching a gray-haired Jay hand off the show to Conan O'Brien, who's in the process of going bald in front of our eyes. If you think this has me catching myself with the wonder of how fast things recede into the rearview mirror, think of how my parent's generation, which came of age watching Johnny Carson, must feel. Not only is Carson dead, but the guy who replaced him was on the air for nearly two decades before retiring himself!

Time does indeed go by, ladies and gentleman. We've got to make the most of it, and I mean all of it, because it turns out we've got a lot less of it than we think.