Happy birthday dear Daniel

Today is my brother’s birthday. He’s 24 or 25. 26? I don’t know—I would have to do the math, and, thank you, no, I don’t math. He’s younger than I, and I am pretty sure I am around 30, maybe 35. But certainly no older. At least I don’t feel older. My body still does pretty much everything I want it to do—a lot more than it used to do, really—and feels good as well. I had a doctor tell me I had some arthritis in my left hip, but I am pretty sure she was looking at the wrong chart. It’s ok, it happens.

I heard a story on NPR once about aging. The reporter talked with people in nursing homes about how they felt about growing older. No one the reporter interviewed considered themselves old but thought people in the decade ahead of them were old. So the 70-year-old didn’t think of herself as old, but thought the 80-year-old was over-the-hill. And people in their 80s said people in their 90s were the real fogies. And for 90-year-olds? I guess it’s at 100 that everything really falls apart.

In the corona, I am a Zoom Video Star blasting into students’ living rooms, dining rooms, and a disturbingly large number of bedrooms twice a week. I spend a lot of time looking at my face on the screen. With enough bright light, the right camera angles, and some deftly applied make-up, I look youthful enough to feel attractive but not youthful enough to blend in with my students. I like to pretend they would be shocked—truly shocked—to learn my actual age. I’m shocked every time I say it or write the number on a form. Can that really be right?

But it’s not my body nor my face nor my medical forms that make me feel old, it’s my ability to start sentences with, “I remember about 30 years ago when…”. I do remember about 30 years ago when. And about 40 years ago when. And about 49 years ago when my brother was born. I remember our house. I remember his crib. I remember my parents playing cards with friends at the kitchen table and me behind a chair sticking bobby pins in an electric socket. I remember the story that everyone remembers (but I witnessed) about a hair and the hospital and Nic, you should be happy that one ended well. You wouldn’t be here if it hadn’t.

In the corona, everything is topsy-turvy. The government encourages us to stay home and do nothing and then sends us free money for doing so. Kids lazily teach themselves and teachers are scrambling to learn. Rent, taxes, baseball, and vacations (and pretty much anything else you had planned for the next 6 months) have been deferred. So why not aging? 2020 is a leap year that lept the whole year. We can celebrate birthdays, but they don’t count. Let’s just eat cake & party like it’s 2019 or 1999–or like it’s 1971 when all was right in the world for just a little while.

Photo by Christina Hernández on Unsplash