Musings on Age

SS, aka, Dame Nuisance, is one of the few bloggie friends I actually know IRL. She and I have grown closer over the past year and I am honored to call her a close friend. She is a fiery redhead who is not afraid to speak out and one of the funniest women I know...if you haven't checked out her blog, Black Holes and Macrame, here's your opportunity to do so. She never disappoints, whether expounding on a 'Dilbert' like day at the office, recalling conversations with her precocious daughter, or calling out idiots...enjoy what I imagine is a typical dinner conversation at the S house...

Not too long ago at dinner, Darling Daughter suddenly declared that she was already seven (even though she won't be seven until the end of this month). Exercising a woman's prerogative to change her mind, she then declared she was actually eight years old. Darling Husband foolishly decided to disagree with DD and told her she was six going on seven and not eight. DD disputed this and the argument was on. Finally, after many rounds of 'no-you're-not-yes-I-am, nuh-uh-uh-huhs,' DH said in exasperation: "You can't just make your age up!"

I had stayed out of their argument up to that point, but it occurred to me that, yes, we
can
and we
do
make our ages up, so I nodded my head along with DD and said "Yeah we can." DH blinked and then acceded defeat with grace and humor, and DD spent the rest of the evening as an eight-year-old by choice (if not chronology).

The days of being seven
and a half
or eleven
and three quarters
are long gone for me. As is the anticipation of turning sixteen, eighteen or twenty-one. Somewhere along the way, somewhere between twenty-one and thirty, things change for us. There are no more ages to happily anticipate because of the onset of new privileges. There is no longer any good reason to admit your age (if you are inclined to admit it at all). You certainly don't round your age up or keep an exact count and say that you are twenty-nine and a half. You are twenty-nine until the last microsecond before midnight on the day of your birth, even if you were actually born at six a.m. You may even start referring to your age in a general sense: 'I'm in my thirties'. Then forty looms large and suddenly, with a loud screech, you slam the brakes on and decide that holding steady at thirty-nine sounds pretty darn good. I, for one, will be celebrating my fourth annual 39th birthday this year. For the mathematically impaired that means I'm going to be ... thirty-nine (ha! Did you really think I was going to say anything else? A lady never tells ... and neither do I).

But I warn you: If you tell someone that you're thirty-nine in front of a six-almost-seven-year-old, prepare to be outed. Because to the mind of a six-almost-seven-year-old, it is always good to be older, and there your chronological age will be, blinking in the sunlight, as pink and goose-pimply as a newly sheared lamb, while you stand there wishing your offspring had just uttered an untimely expletive instead. You know the one, it's the expletive now pinging around inside your head, the expletive you are desperately trying not to bellow at the top of your lungs in a sudden onset of Tourette's. Sometimes I think I'm being silly. But Nonetheless, until I'm a cigar-smoking, whiskey-swilling centenarian like George Burns, I'm sticking to thirty-nine ... just like Jack Benny (damn ... I just aged myself, didn't I?).

Well, then, here's to being old enough to know better, but young enough to do it anyway ... or something like that. They say the memory is the first to go ...