Frank: On Turning 40
By Frank Valbiro
When I think back on all of the milestone birthdays I’ve been blessed to reach, it all starts with 1990. I remember being in the back seat of my mother’s car thinking about how big the number five was, and how grown up it was going to be to finally get out of the booster seat. A few years later, I would be struck by the realization, at age nine, that I would never again be single-digits ever again. 13 was significant because not only was I able to adopt the title of teen, but I got my first job mopping floors, washing dishes, and cutting cucumbers at Michelina’s Pizza in Stamford, Connecticut.
The early teen years were a pain in the ass, though—you’re a race dog being forced to sit behind the starting gate. You can’t get into the clubs you want to go to; you can’t buy much of anything that you really want; you can’t drive yet, and chalked IDs provided limited success at even the seediest of pubs. High School football victory parties were on-point, and Halloween took on a new life, but it never prevented the Come Home message your mother would send to your beeper when things really started to get interesting.
Despite all of the reasons I have to never be that young again, things started looking up around 18. Anthony and I were playing gigs with our band all over the tri-state area, borrowing my mother’s Ford Windstar for my first drives through the boroughs of New York City without any parental supervision. From 18 to 20-years-old, we started representing ourselves in the world on our own, and learning a lot of lessons along the way.
Our first band broke up in August of 2005, and in the middle of our deciding what to do next, I began coaching Little League. It was a trip to be called “coach” for the first time. And it was around that same time that I met 19-year-old Lauren at the “Pharmacy of Love.”
In April of 2006, I had finally arrived. I was 21. So I did what any red-blooded American alpha would do on his 21st birthday, and I took Lauren out for a birthday dinner at Applebee’s in Mamaroneck, New York, and ordered my first legal drink to the table...a mudslide.
Whatever, I like milkshakes; it looked like a spiked milkshake, and from what I remember, it was good.
25 was fun. I was old enough to rent a car at Hertz by myself. Anthony, Mike, and I opened up our first studio location in April of 2009, so we were feeling pretty independent despite sinking every dollar we had into keeping this foolhardy New Media dream afloat.
At 30, Lauren and I had moved in together and marriage was on the horizon. There were reasons to be excited for every new plateau, and my 30s brought professional independence, fatherhood, the current studio location, as well as bearing witness to all kinds of history being made.
...And so came 40.
I still feel strong, sharp, energetic, full of life, love, and vigor, and brimming with new ideas. But 40 is different in one major way: 40 was the first time I heard the call to prayer and penitence on the eve of a birthday. There was an unspoken knowing that this was the beginning of a great and glorious run that will end in the passing of a torch that we’re never meant to hold onto forever.
On Sunday, March 31, Lauren surprised me with a gathering of friends and family at our home, and whereas I did my share of socializing, I often found myself quietly absorbing the room, admiring the generations of people who were there, missing those who were gone, and contemplating my place among them all. I think every man and woman can most accurately measure their true wealth in a setting like that, when you can account for all of the people you could count on if you were ever in a pinch, or even if you just wanted to share the room.
The thought reminded me of some of those do-nothing weekends, bored at home, when I was 15. There were some nights I would have done anything to be in a bustling crowd, getting into trouble with whoever I was hanging out with at the time, and I suppose there is nothing wrong with that. It’s natural. However, in 2025, I want to yell 25 years into the past, at 15-year-old Frank, to “Go downstairs! Watch an extra movie with Mom, and Skip, and Anthony. Bask in the feeling of drifting off to sleep knowing that everyone was home, and young, and healthy again!”
Perspective can be a bitch sometimes, but I’ve been told that we always have 100% left, and that every day is a new opportunity to make choices that put the most important things first. So, Happy Birthday to me—cheers to the next set of 40!
-Frank