I’m on deadline as I settle in to write this column. And I’m not just talking about my Herald-Citizen deadline, which is earlier than usual this week because of the Christmas holiday. I’m also on birthday deadline. Because on December 29, my age will become a number that so astonishes me I can hardly bear to say it out loud.
Seventy.
How could it possibly be true? Might I have done the math wrong? Maybe 2024 minus 1954 is an arithmetic problem that’s just too hard. But I know that’s not so. For the first time in the seven decades I’ve lived upon this beautiful earth, this “ends in zero” birthday hits hard. Really, really hard. I loved turning 10 because my age was double digits for the first time. I was enjoying college at age 20. When I was 30, I was mother to a baby girl, with two more babies soon to follow. Forty was fabulous.
To celebrate my 50th birthday, my mother requested letters from dozens of people who’d known me over the years and put them in a scrapbook. Friends. Relatives. Neighbors. Teachers. Employers. It’s a gift I treasure, though I haven’t pulled it off the shelf in years. Three months after that birthday, Mother died of a fast-moving cancer, which makes the scrapbook even more dear.
Ten years later, at 60, my long marriage fell apart. That birthday was especially tough.
But there’s something about the big seven-o that’s downright sobering. I remind myself that if 100 years is an achievable lifespan, then I’m only in the third quarter. Late in the third quarter, sure, but still there. These days, I take a Centrum Silver multivitamin every day AND a magnesium supplement to head off muscle cramps and hip pain. I descend the stairs from my bedroom to the main floor one at a time, not because I’m winded or afraid of falling but because it’s a little easier on my arthritic feet. Before I turn on the coffeemaker and do three sun salutations early every morning, I take my blood pressure and write the number down. I do this because my cardiologist told me to.
Yeah, I have a cardiologist.
The good news is that I can still ride my bicycle, which has no “e-boost,” through the rolling hills of Tennessee. I can hurl a tennis ball clear across the yard. I can hoist myself onto a horse’s back and lope through the woods, though increasingly I worry about being “throwed.” I play pickleball every chance I get. Though my waist has thickened and my chin has sagged, I’ve never colored my hair, which is pretty much the same shade of red as when I was a child.
Perhaps I’m not so old after all.
Maybe I’m like George Jones’s perception of himself in his1983 hit song “I Don’t Need Your Rockin’ Chair.” He didn’t need your Geritol or your Medicare. His body was old but not impaired. He wasn’t ready for the junkyard yet, because he still felt like a new Corvette. I’ll spare you the rest of the lyrics. You likely already know them.
I’m not listening to George Jones as my big day approaches. I choose, instead, the late, great Jimmy Buffett. It’s not “A Pirate Looks at Forty” I listen to, though I do love that one. The Buffett song I play over and over again is “Merry Christmas, Alabama.” The best verse goes like this:
Now my life’s moved at near light-speed
Since I started this wild and crazy run
Such a long way from my first birthday
Merry Christmas, everyone
Now that this column is done, I might play it one more time while I thumb through the scrapbook my mother made me just twenty short years ago.
(December 28, 2024)