All My Loving

As I prepare to download his new album, “Memory Almost Full,” to iTunes, I am thinking about my lifelong love affair with Paul McCartney. When I was sixteen, it was all about his looks, combined with my hormones. I mean, that amazing voice, those puppy eyes! No one else could make me swoon like that and I stayed attracted to wide-eyed, floppy-haired guys for a period of time. Later in his career, while I was still struggling with mine as a young singer-songwriter, I was taken with his musicianship. The man was simply brilliant. I was less thrilled with the music he created with his band Wings. Still, I found plenty to admire and envy about his devoted relationship with his wife Linda, even as I was looking for love in all the wrong places. Nowadays, my feelings for Paul are as strong as ever. His apparent optimism and his open-minded and open-hearted take on life are a breath of fresh air. He is a role model and a reminder that I don’t need to view growing older with nearly the dread that I do. It doesn’t hurt that he’s made a killer album. Or that halfway through his sixties, he still has that amazing voice and those puppy eyes.