I turned 44 years old last week. If there is a more unremarkable age to turn I can’t think of it.
At 16 a person can drive a car. Well, a person can legally operate a vehicle if he or she passed the proper tests and received a license. There are people you run across on a regular basis who seem not to have actually mastered such things as turn signals.
When you turn 18 a person is allowed to vote. This means P. Diddy, or whatever name he is going by now, advocates you pay attention to politics and vote your mind. Some generation’s voices of political conscience are people like John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. This generation has a hip hop music mogul. We may be in deep trouble.
When a person turns 21 he is allowed to buy alcoholic beverages. In a way this makes sense. It is three years after the person has been allowed to vote and he has lived with the choices he made for three years and could use a stiff drink.
At thirty years old a person has made the final crossover to being an adult. Remember a person over thirty is not to be trusted. That is what the folks at Woodstock believed. Now all those people are well over thirty and have probably even voted Republican.
However, when you turn 44 there is no rite of passage. It isn’t even an age which people would understand if you were depressed. Guy #1: “What’s the matter, Tom? You look a little down in the dumps.” Guy #2: “Well, Jim I’ll tell you. I turned 44 yesterday and I’m feeling a little bummed out.” Guy #1: “Gee, Tom I didn’t realize. Boy, 44, that’s pretty tough.” Guy #2: “I didn’t think it would hit me so hard.” Guy #1: “I see where you’re coming from. I mean, wow, 44. This means you’re…you’re…oh, get over yourself! 44 is nothing. Ooooo, it’s 23 years until I retire. I still have my health. My kids are old enough to take care of themselves. Some of my hair is gray. Waaahhhh.” Guy #1 walks away in disgust after lambasting Guy #2 with sarcasm and disdain.
Guy #1 is right. There really isn’t anything to be concerned about; except for the possibility that you may have gotten so unremarkable you may cease to be interesting. There is an old Monty Python sketch in which a man is asked a question and he responds, “I am an accountant and consequently too boring to be of interest.” That is probably my fear. (I do not fear becoming an accountant. I have friends who are accountants and they are not completely uninteresting.) I fear becoming boring.
This fear is not unfounded. Recently I have found myself discussing, at some length, our household budget. If we pay off this bill and then roll that monthly payment into that bill we can…arrgghhh. It is important and it can make a huge difference in my children’s lives if I am able to get out of debt and pay for their college educations, but that doesn’t mean it is fun.
I have said for years, “I hate doing grown-up junk.” This usually meant bills, car maintenance, insurance policies and anything involving the word prostate. The issue here is obviously proof I haven’t grown up. A true grown-up doesn’t whine about doing the day-to-day business of taking care of himself and his family. A true grown-up identifies the important things in life and deals with them in a mature manner. A true grown-up doesn’t shirk the unpleasant tasks. A true grown-up wakes up each morning and dutifully goes to work, pays the bills, cleans the house, does the dishes, and then sneaks into his bedroom, fires up the PlayStation and plays four and half solid hours of Madden NFL ’07.
Being a grown-up means I stand in the stiff Kansas wind on a Saturday morning and watch my son play soccer, or more accurately, run wildly from one end of the field to the other with several other eight-year-olds doing the same partially organized endeavor. Being a grown-up means being amazed when my eleven-year-old daughter comes up with the perfect witty retort which makes the entire room break-up laughing. Being a grown-up means watching my oldest daughter make caring and positive decisions which show she is much brighter than her old man. Being a grown-up means sitting down exhausted after a crummy day at work and having my wife give me a look and smile which lets me know I’m not doing it for nothing. Being a grown-up can mean you have a darned fine life…I still refuse to do anything involving the word prostate.
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6 comments:
Yeah, 44's nothing. Now turning 40 - that's down right scary!
your little sister
I still refuse to do anything involving the word prostate.
Lol. Nice ending. You're not boring, you're keen!
Being able to clearly remember the little sister who is now 40 standing in a driveway on 17th IN DIAPERS and realizing you have known the author for 39 years - that's scary and boring simultaneously! HBCB, but what does the second "B" really stand for?
I do not understand the HBCB sentence. Is it because I am old and unhip, so I do not understand internet chat room shorthand for stuff?
There was a drive-in theatre manager once, named Lola. On her birthday, the encrypted message HBLB was put up on the marquee. Someone who shared your name but was much cuter than you had two different translations for the encryption. recall?
Well, another aspect of growing older is fading memory strength. I have no memory of the HBLB, which makes the HBCB tougher. The "HB" part is easy, but the second "B" is purely conjecture on my part. But knowing the cuter, younger, and better equipped with memory abilities person with my name and the main person he hung out with the second "B" was probably derogatory.
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