Feels Like A Reasonable Age

Every age feels like a reasonable age when you reach it.  I can recall a boss of mine ten years ago commented on this.  Someone had just turned forty.  I was forty at the time.  He looked at us earnestly and suggested the following:  “Forty?  Forty’s nothing.  Wait till you turn fifty.  At fifty you can see the way down to death.  Clearly.”  It struck me that his privileged view could only be true.  He’d seen it.  I hadn’t.  I couldn’t be true for me, until I, Inshala, reached that spot on the trek up the mountain and could consider the vantage for myself. 

The view is certainly different than it was back at forty, but I don’t think of it the same dismal terms my old friend did.  It all feels quite reasonable to be this age.  I assume that everyone else feels the same:  this is a perfectly reasonable age to be.  Fifty seemed anything but reasonable at any other time in my life.  Arriving at the station, what could be more natural?  I know that kids will look to this age and shudder in disbelief.  They have to.  And people who are forty like I was will necessarily count their blessings that they are comparatively young.   And the oldsters will think of fifty, wistfully.  Anything was possible, then.  Ages are demystified, as we reach them.

I’ve been enjoying the fifth decade for four months or so and it’s a perfectly nice year.  And all along the way my oldest cadre of chums whom we shared high school or college with are all arriving at this date in grand succession.  Last night I wrote my dear friend to tell him his day had arrived here in China.  Writing back from LA he insisted:  “I’m still forty nine!”

Later, the next day, he acknowledged that he made it.  It would have been nice to have been there with him.  It would have been nice to have had him over here four month’s ago, as well.  But we live where we do, and internet immediacy is a reasonable compromise.  And he still seems as youthful as he always did, as I suppose we’ll both seem, till all the world’s a rearview mirror.