9-4-2008.
Well, it’s official: I can’t be trusted.
That was what my father said when he called me to congratulate me on my thirtieth birthday. Actually, I believe he first said, “Happy birthday, old man.” Setting aside the obvious pot-kettle issues here, I would like to point out that until this point my parents have continually stressed to me how young I was.You’re only twenty-nine they’ve said. Or You’re not even thirty!
Now, however, it seems that the tide has turned. I am no longer fit for consolation. Having turned the corner, my impending mortality is no longer taboo.
What is it about thirty? I mean, I don’t feel any older. All the things that make me feel young—my relative health, my immaturity—are just as true right now as they were a week ago. And all the things that make me feel old—creaky knees, a taste for herring—have been true a lot longer than that.
Take my hair. It started falling out when I was around twenty, and since then there’s been a slow, steady migration from my head to the bathroom floor, the follicular equivalent of brain drain. (There must be something very disincentivizing about remaining attached to my scalp. High local tax rates? I don’t know. I ought to look into changing the policies, make the top of my head a more attractive place for hair to invest and settle down…) In college I had a brief flirtation with Rogaine, which proved so unbearably itchy that I stopped using it after about a week. I was tempted by Propecia, the hair-restoring pill, but once glance at its list of its side effects was enough to make me shudder. I quickly abandoned the idea of a medical miracle, accepted my fate, and have contented myself ever since with a more flattering method of brushing. Having had a decade to get used to that particular sign of aging, it no longer bothers me (that much).
So it’s not like I turned thirty and all of a sudden the last three decades caught up to me. What, then, induces this awareness—both in myself and others—that I am no longer a young man?
You could say that it’s a simple matter of numbers. Your teens are for rebellion; your twenties are for having fun; your thirties are for sobering up and becoming an adult. But I think that’s too facile an explanation. I think there’s something else going on here, and that is this: what my thirtieth birthday has accomplished is not to make me old, but to permit the awareness that I am already old. What do I mean by this? I mean that I’ve actually been old for a very, very long time. It’s just that now, with the passing of my twenties, it’s no longer impolite for people to point it out.
This requires some explanation.
I have a theory that people are born at a certain age and stay that way for their entire lives. Call it one’s Inherent Age. For instance, we all know someone youngish who seems to be in his sixties, a grumpy old man—and has always been that way, even as a little kid. And likewise we all know someone who seems permanently stuck in his late teens, despite his expanding gut. To me, there’s more to this than just seeming unusually mature for one’s age, on the one hand, or refusing to “grow up,” on the other. I think that people actually embody their Inherent Age, from the way they think and act to the way they style themselves, physically.
Example: I have a friend whose IA is surely seventy-three. He’s about my age in physical years, but the first time I met him, at the age of twenty-one, I could see what he would look like fifty-two years hence. He has the posture of an older man. He has the sly sense of humor of someone who’s been around the block a few times (or a few too many times). He has blond hair that, in certain lights, appears white. In short, the guy is old, and always has been. I bet he was making cracks about “these darn kids” when he was in kindergarten.
If you’re honest with yourself, I think you can probably pick out your own IA. Mine, I think, is about forty-three. That’s me: permanently middle-aged. I’ve always had a slightly antiquated aesthetic sense. I’m not cool but sometimes think I am, to the embarrassment of those around me. I love my barbecue grill and sometimes stand in front of it in shorts and an apron.
Even my relative lack of maturity gives evidence: because my immaturity is not the immaturity of someone who has never grown up. It’s the immaturity of someone who is all too aware that he has grown up, and is desperately (and bootlessly) trying to regaina sense of immaturity. It’s the immaturity of a mid-life crisis. No matter my numerical age, I am forty-three, and to deny this would be as self-defeating as to deny the nose on my face.
If you need any further proof, I submit the following: when I graduated college, my parents offered me a car. I asked for a Volvo station wagon.
Case closed.
Perhaps this was what my father was getting at when he called me old man. Because his IA is, in fact, considerably lower than mine. My dad sometimes jokes that he has a seven year-old’s understanding of money, but actually I think it’s more like a sixteen year-old’s. He’s permanently a teenager, never having lost his zest for life, his desire to buy cool stuff, and his contempt for authority.
It’s a little disconcerting, being older than one’s father, but I have had a long time to adjust to it, having been forty-three for thirty years now.
Anyhow, now that my youth has passed, the glovesare off: nobody has to pretend any longer that I’m actually the age on my driver’s license. Least of all me. There’s no sense in fighting the tide. Embrace it, I say. Embrace it. So in the coming years I am going to revel in my middle-agedness, and exploit it to its full potential. Not only am I going to be forty-three, I am going to be Forty-Three.
I’m going to complain about my mortgage and comment on the need to work more fiber into my diet. I’m going to say slightly inappropriate things in public that make my wife say “Je-e-eeess” in the same tone of voice that our future children will say “Da-a-aaad.” (For the record, my wife is a permanent twenty-five.) I’m going to dream about making wild decisions before submitting, invariably, to sensible concerns.
When I find—as I did three months ago—a white chest hair (and I’m talking snow-white, not grayish) I’m going to do a little dance of celebration.
I’m going to watch basketball games and comment on how young these guys are. And to have so much money!
I’m going to start shopping at Eddie Bauer.
I am going to sporadically update this blog…because that’s what the kids are doing these days.
I am going to marvel at new technology, but from a place of incomprehension, rather than understanding.How do they fit all those songs on my iPhone? I’m going to ask. Where do they go?
I’m going to read the Economist and find it funny.
I am going to be just aware enough of the zeitgeist to understand that I am out of step with it.
I’m going to talk about how I’m going to start lifting weights again when “my back is all healed up.”
I’m going to regret not having paid better attention in school, and failingly attempt to learn a new language.
And goddammit I’m going to Sea World.
Bear in mind that being forever middle-aged has its advantages. When, for instance, I am forty-four, I will still be forty-three. When I am fifty, I will still be forty-three. When I am sixty, seventy, and eighty, I will still be forty-three. Hence I take some comfort in knowing that, should I live to be at least a day older than eighty-six, I will have spent more than half my life younger than I actually am. There’s something to be said for that.
Of course, this is nothing compared to someone like my father, who, if he lives to be at least eighty-six, will have spent more than seventy years being younger than he actually is. But it’s a lot better than my friend Jim, who, should he live to be at least eighty-six, will have only spent thirteen years younger than he actually is, and, seventy-three years being older than he is.
I suppose you could argue the exact opposite. For example, you might say that Jim at age eighty-six will have then had only thirteen years of young age, which means that he will be bar mitzvah vis-à-vis youngsterism. Whereas my dad at eighty-six will have had seventy years of young age, in effect making him an old hand at being young. And we know how much energy being young requires. Imagine being sixteen for seventy years! I get tired just thinking about it.
But whatever your perspective, it seems clear to me that if age is “just a number,” it’s not in the sense in which people usually mean. Age—or Inherent Age, which is what really matters—is not “just a number” in the sense of being irrelevant. To the contrary: it’s just a number in the sense that it is just that: a number, which is to say something eternal, immutable. And therefore it is extremely relevant. You should be aware of your IA, because in some sense it helps define who you are.
Those of us who are permanently middle-aged understand this well, as we are at a point in our lives where we can look both backward and forward with the same degree of hazy clarity. I can remember what it was like to be sixteen, and I can easily envision the day I am hobbling on a cane. Then as now as in the future, I’m going to wander all over the house, complaining about fiber, all the way up the stairs, over to this computer, where I will sit down and write a blog entry. No matter how old I am in “real life,” I’ll still be the same age I am now. I’ll still have a smattering of hair, and I’ll still be writing about things that went out of fashion ten minutes ago. I’ll do it with a smile and a plate of herring, which truly is delicious, at any time, in any era.
