Monday, May 26, 2008

Just how cool is a moose?

One of my favorite teachers in in high school was Mr. Ristow, who taught U.S. History and Government. I was never a very good student. I got bored and distracted easily. Mr. Ristow was able to hold my interest, partly because he was funny, with a sense of humor that matched mine pretty well. He'd often underscore a point by giving an aside in the form of a conversation between some hypothetical student and himself. If he thought (likely from experience - my senior year was his 33rd at that school) that we might not be getting why something was important, it would be, "'So?' Sew buttons on a watermelon - so this:..." and explain the point. If the first part of point was extremely obvious, he'd say, "Yes, and there's no bones in ice cream." My favorite - when something seemed great at first, but had something hidden, the segue between the two was, "Cool as a moose, and twice as hairy."

One thing I recall Mr. Ristow saying, when we learned in Government that you have to be 35 years old to be President, was that he realized at our age that 35 must seem like having "one foot in the grave, and the other on a banana peel." I don't recall exactly what I felt back then about being 35. Today, at 35, it does not feel that way. In fact, it doesn't really connect in my mind that I've aged in the almost 2 decades since then.

I don't quite know how that's possible. Logically, I know that the time has passed. I graduated from high school 18 years ago. More time has passed since then than passed between my birth and then. I've done, seen, and been 18 years' worth since then. More than six thousand, five hundred days have come and gone in their endless, trudging regularity; the sun has circled the sun 18 times. I've watched younger relatives grow up, I've watched my hair start to go gray and most of my friends' hair simply go, I've watched 3 Austin Powers movies (this sort of thing is my bag, baby). Yet, no way I know to mark the passage of time, and the recognition of my passage through it, results in the realization that each of these passage has left me older.

I don't seem to be alone in this. I read somewhere recently that, in a poll of baby boomers, the average age at which they consider old age to start is 79. (The oldest baby boomers are 62.) Apparently, I'm not the only one that find getting old to be something that only happens to the other guy. Still, I don't take much comfort in that. I prefer to be rational. In this regard, tho, I am completely irrational . I just wish I knew what to do about it.

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