See here how everything
lead up to this day
and it’s just like
any other day
that’s ever been
Sun goin up
and then the
sun it goin down
Shine through my window and
my friends they come around
come around
come around
That’s a favorite lyric of mine, written by Robert Hunter for the Grateful Dead. I think about it all the time.
The rest of the song is about a guy who is dying, so I like to take it out of context, but I’m sure that’s ok. I know song writers expect that.
Ordinarily, I try not to burden The Internet with stuff about my age, but I’m going to pick sixty as my Milestone and get it over with. Twenty was confusing for me because they were busy changing all the rules for different behaviors from eighteen to twenty-one. I was real busy when I was thirty, although I had a friend who fell apart emotionally that year so I knew it happened. Same excuse for forty; I was REALLY busy by that time.
Fifty was pretty milestone-esque. It was just BEFORE 9/11 and everything was like it was before that, and my son and daughter-in-law provided an appropriate surprise with black balloons and the works but I was distracted, let’s say, and I failed to see any crises of the mid-life kind. I saw a few right AFTER that, but I attributed them mostly to lawyers.
I really didn’t care for large portions of the last part of that year but it all lead directly to right now.
I do care for large portions of “now”. Yes, I find some of the tiny buttons I have to push to survive in The Future annoying and not intuitive, yes, I’m a little surprised by the fact that I can’t speed-walk to the Caseys Store in heat that’s measured the same as a hundred and four degrees, yes, I even catch myself having to think really hard at certain little details that used to impersonate big details.
For the most part though, I’m delighted to be participating in The Future. Just like they “have to” ask you at the Post Office if you’re mailing anything that’s going to blow up, they “have to” ask you at the grocery store if you’re old enough to buy cigarettes. I probably AM old enough to know better, but that’s not the question.
From “in here”, I feel about the same as I always have. I may know a few more rote answers, and I recognize more situations than I did when I was younger, and I’ve even become a better grocery shopper, just like the guy who was ahead of me in line the other day. “I’m eighty-three” he explained “and I never expected to be learning about doing laundry”.
I know exactly what he meant. He’s talking about somebody who isn’t doing the laundry anymore, and judging by how eager the guy was to make conversation, that somebody is also not among us anymore.
I never expected it either but by the same token I never expected to learn whatever it was I learned when I was eight and still be using it today which was an inconceivable time. Anything past Christmas of that year was inconceivable.
There went one of those pauses. I had to think about what I DID learn when I was eight. That was the year my third grade teacher made two of us just promise to sit there nicely and read the encyclopedia, which we did. That was a nice jump-start on years nine through sixty.
As far as I can tell, the only practical difference between then and now was the way nap time was enforced. I get really cranky now if you mess that up.
