Turning Fifty

People who say life begins at 40 are optimists. People who say it begins at 50 are liars. I’ve only been 50 for a few months and I’m already tired of it. It’s like the warranty on a GM drive train: Five miles past your limit and the transmission falls out. I’ve strained more tendons and pulled more ligaments in the last six months than I knew I had. Someone told me it was dietary – so I took some supplements.

Somebody told me my chi thingy was messed up, so I had some acupuncture. I even went to see a homoeopathist who asked me about my relationship with my father and gave me some sugar pills. I was still becoming a small collection of muscle spasms so I went to see somebody with a medical degree and he said, “You’re fifty. Get used to it.”

So I’m trying to get used to it. I buy my ibuprofen in the twin value pack and I live in the basic fear that has gripped middle-aged people from when the first Cro-Magnon threw his back out picking lowbush cranberries. An aging Thomas Jefferson put it this way, “Here a pivot, there a wheel, now a pinion, next a spring will give away.”

Tom, ol’ boy, I hear you. I keep catching whiffs of death not only on my good health, but also on my career and my cozy American lifestyle. I try to convince myself I’m hallucinating because things are actually going better than ever. I’m at the prime of my life in everyway except the way I feel about it. There must be some genetic trigger that forces us to start panicking about our age at a certain point. Age 50, for example. It could be nature’s cute little way of piling on added stress so we’ll all have heart attacks and get the heck off of the payroll.

So I try to relax. I have a kid in college and a two-year-old in the kitchen for god sake. I can’t afford to become one of these cranky and tired old codgers, yet. I don’t even have time to learn how to suck at golf.

Sure it’s a long way back up from the Lego pile these days, but I have a lifetime of experiences and hard won wisdom to impart to my boys and I want to stay sharp. I think my mind might already be sagging a little bit. Yesterday I tried to tell the little guy why we don’t eat rocks, and I drew a blank. I couldn’t remember why we don’t eat rocks. Why don’t we eat rocks?

I talk to my older boy about his future. How to prepare for it. Opportunities he might explore. I might as well be telling him how to soften animal hides with his teeth for all the good it does him. I don’t know what he’s up against in this world. I have no idea where the prizes are in this economy. I don’t even know which is Game Boy and which is X-box.

I’m a dinosaur. Not even a big scary dinosaur. More like one of those lumbering bloated ones that are always featured with razor toothed little meat-eaters attached to their underbellies.

But it’s not like fifty years of living hasn’t taught me how to cope, and I’m doing what I’ve always done when faced with a frightening and depressing new challenge. I get frightened. And depressed.

But, these are not terminal afflictions and I intend to survive this stage of life just like I did my clumsy childhood, my unbalanced adolescence, my ill-conceived twenties, and my – whatever that is we used to do in our thirties and forties. I thought that was middle-age. But I was an optimist back then.

As heard on The Bob Edwards Show on XM/Sirius Radio October 18, 2005