Sometimes a single glance can tell you more than a lifetime of mirrors.

https://youtu.be/l8jH_zgl6m0

I wrote this song in 1997, just after I turned 40, on a breezy night along 4th Avenue in Tucson. A beautiful young woman asked me for a cigarette, and in that brief exchange, something shifted. She didn’t flirt. Didn’t linger. Didn’t play the game. She simply said no—so clearly, so casually—it echoed deeper than I expected.

That moment became a quiet reckoning. I realized I’d crossed an invisible threshold. I wasn’t the young lion anymore—I was just a man trying to find his footing on a street that no longer bent toward him.

The song that followed blends memory with metaphor: a priest who can’t offer clarity, a hymn that doesn’t start on cue, and an accident that wakes the soul. It’s a dream, a fall, a slow nod to the truth: middle age isn’t an end—it’s a turning.

A little funny, a little tragic, and painfully true. This one’s for anyone who ever hit that invisible wall and thought: Hell no… now what?