Fifty Five.....

There is some element or point of reaching an age.  They are all significant.  I mean when you think about it, one through twelve seems so long, but glorious.  Thirteen is the milestone of age, because you are a teenager, and life still creeps by letting you enjoy and learn, and love clear up to eighteen, which has its significance, after all, you can vote at that age.  There are still a thousand things you can’t do, which is probably like four things, until you reach twenty one, and then bang, argghh, uhhhh, adulthood strikes with its great hammer and says, “You are now an adult, you will live by the adult ways, adult laws, blah, blah, blah.”

Being thirty hits, fast and quick.  Your own children have begun their life’s pursuits, and without realizing what is happening, you too, are growing older.  Horrible sounding phrase.  Yuck.  Makes things sound as though there is nothing you can do, because you have stopped growing, but now you are growing older.  Awful.  Because the next thing you find, is you are forty.  Have a kid or two in there?  Well they are reaching eighteen, or twenty.

Who is that third guy?

Then there is fifty.  Goodness sake, fifty years old.  THAT IS OLD. You must remember your grandparent(s) as the old man or the old woman, who walked around all feeble and crippled, and managed to get from chair to another chair, and you were spritely (yea!  I got to use the word spritely) and bouncy, and couldn’t stop, and managed to bounce of the ears of the older people, and fall brightly into the sands, and throw rocks, and hit your cousin just right, who was mad and then that little sucker cried, after he got back to the bunch of relatives you had left behind.  Great day.

Don't be nervous son-in-law, it is just a picture.

Then one day you wake up and realize, on your fifty fifth birthday, that you have entered a new phase, a new stone to jump, a methodology that man has made,  that says you have now begun the entrance into “senior-ville”, that you have started the phase of eating at four o’clock to four thirty, that you share your meal with the other half, no matter how much it irritates you. That regardless of people’s thoughts, time on your hands, try-as-you-may efforts of rekindling your spirit, you are there.

Old Man.  Oh and that's my Dad.

There is an entire phase of adulthood taking place here.  Your parents, who seem quite old, (that are much younger than you think), but much older than life gives them credit for.  You really have to become worried, and distraught at all the things they are going through as your personal elders, and see the things that, if you look, must be close

to the things you yourself will experience.  If you think fast or think little, maybe which will go away.  It has come to be that time when we have no choice, because our kids have branched out and begun to have kids, which it is now our responsibility to look backward, at our parents, and do the best we can to make them happy.  As happy as we can make them.

There are those among us that have already lost one, or both of their parents, or in the case of divorce, lost all four, which means there was likely at a minimum of eight grandparents, unless of course there were divorces or deaths among them and then the numbers get out of hand and you may as well not count everyone.  Regardless, there are the people who were in the same  school classes, one or two years ahead, one or two behind, that have felt this wrenching feeling, only to be told or hammered into them, they must go on.

So, fifty five.  It leaves a person a bit upended.  I really cannot write much about fifty six, or sixty, or seventy, or eighty plus, because it is only that I know people, and love them, and participate in life with them, and bear witness to their lives and loves, and am part of their deaths.  For now though, I think I will stick to fifty five. 

Oh My Goodness....

I have an entire year, well minus two days because I have written this on the Monday following, which will take about three days or four days before some of you read this, which still leaves me three-hundred sixty one days of being fifty five to contend with, all on my own.  Of course, when I have slept once or twice or three times, I have dealt with the things of the days that take my time, and I have realized with great fortitude, that I am still strong, still bald, gray haired, sore in the shoulder, legs feeling beat up, etc… that oh no, fifty six is here, on that last hot August morning of two thousand and fourteen……..man, fifty five feels pretty good. 

WHEN sixty five comes, and my grandson has graduated high school, and is two years into college, why I shall do my best to be there. My son will be forty, my daughter in just her late thirties, and I shall reach the very end of middle age and begin my “older” life. Ahem, yes, middle age.  After all, I could live to be one hundred and ten.

Sunshine.  That boy is pure sunshine.