"Has Anybody Here Seen My Old Friend Ted?"

It's been a cruel, cruel summer for Americans my age. One by one, the icons of our childhood are dropping like autumn leaves, and we're being forced to sober up in ways we hadn't really prepared for. I mean, you could have 6 kids, 2 mortgages and a metal hip joint and STILL remember where you were when you first saw the "Thriller" video, and STILL feel like you're 21 and life holds all the promise in the world...at least until you heard that Michael was dead at 50.

I'll admit to letting a serious funk creep up on me lately, in part because my friends left last week, and it's still chilly enough to wear socks to bed every night--in FRAKKIN' NAIROBI(!!!), and last Friday I had a disastrous clusterfuck of a "reunion" with a guy I'd had a date with a while back, and all of a sudden it feels like life BLOWS and I don't know what the hell I'm doing over here by myself with no close friends or family to give a rat's ass what happens to me.....AND I'll be FORTY-FRAKKIN' EIGHT in about a month.....

That's how I was feeling the other morning, curled in the fetal position in bed, when I logged onto the Macbook and saw that Ted Kennedy had died. Of course I knew it was coming, but it didn't make me feel any less gutted. Somehow, instead of pulling the covers over my head and calling it a day, I managed to get up and drag myself into the office. But I couldn't understand why everybody in the building was carrying on like nothing monumental had just happened. I think my Kenyan colleagues understood why Michael Jackson's death hit me so hard. But for the past few days, I've felt really hollow about Ted Kennedy. A man I didn't know, yet somehow felt like I knew, all my life.

Here's what it's like to be living outside of the US when major icons pass away. You spend the whole time wanting to turn to somebody and say, "Can you believe it? Omigod, how sad! Do you remember when he/she did this/or that?" And every time you get that urge, you have to squash it because not only do the people around you NOT share your feelings, they secretly question your sanity for caring so much about the death of somebody you're not related to. I mean, maybe if it was an infant, or a child, in some kind of horrific scenario. But even then, infants and children die every second of every minute of every day here.

So why get depressed when a 77 year old man dies? Or even a 50 year old, for that matter? The average life expectancy in Kenya is 57. Just when Americans are starting to exit their "Mid-Life Crisis, 2nd Divorce, Red Sportscar and Inappropriately Youthful Fashion Phase" to actually consider the possibility that they may indeed be getting older, people in developing countries are either long dead or considered elderly.

So it was when I read a colleague's Tweet yesterday, where he mocked a 50 year old man hitting on a 21 year old woman by calling him an "old fart." It reminded me that in Kenya, I'm pretty much an Old Fart-ette. What's worse, I'm one with no husband, kids, or grandkids, a Grade A Freak O' Nature. So instead of wasting time feeling sad about Ted Kennedy, they would suggest that I need to find myself a man to, as my dear friend Simone put it, "knock the dust off that thang......."

But I'm going off on a total tangent here, so let me try to get back to the main focus of this posting. Though I haven't been able to bear glueing myself to CNN International this time around to watch coverage of Ted Kennedy's passing, there has been a bit of local news coverage in Kenyan media. Today, one columnist explained how Sen. Kennedy even managed to keep African issues on his radar screen, along with his legion historic American social policy efforts. Reading that column, I realized that's what I long to share with someone here, somebody who gets it. Growing up poor and black in America, the name Kennedy was just as familiar as the name King. Sure, you knew John, Bobby and Teddy came from an extremely wealthy white family, but somehow you were convinced that those guys cared, and wanted to help you and your family succeed in spite of obstacles.

I've written before about my experience as a Head Start kid, and how grateful I was for the free meals and other programs that evolved from the War on Poverty. I also know that Jack, and Bobby, and Teddy, and hundreds of men and women like them, developed those programs not because they had to, but because they believed it was the right thing to do. They didn't spend a lot of time condemning poor, brown-skinned, "lazy" people for reproducing like bunnies. I guess they realized their time was better spent trying to make sure that the children grew up to be responsible, educated, contributing members of society.

I hope I've become that. And I'm so grateful to my "Old Friend Ted" for helping make that happen. And so even though the one time I actually bumped into Ted Kennedy in person a few years ago, at a movie theatre in Washington, DC, and felt really shocked at how old and even feeble he looked, I'm picturing him now looking young and dapper and laughing his ass off because he's finally back with his two best friends.