October 5th, 2017. My 48th birthday.
Hey! Wait a minute…. You mean to say that I’m 48-years old young today? Impossible. I’m a Count Chocula connoisseur. An Ultraman geek. A comic book nerd. A PS4 dork. I couldn’t possibly be someone with the big Five-Oh on the horizon.
And yet, I’ve grown accustomed to listening to the creaks and cracks of getting out of bed every morning and the inevitable gray or missing hairs I see whenever I look into the mirror. Reading glasses have become the norm for me now and summers are often spent resisting the urge to tell young children to get off my lawn.
Seriously, wasn’t it just yesterday that I was the youthful teenager driving my beat-up, old Toyota to the mall on Friday nights after school? Pouring my lawn mowing allowance into video game cabinets at the arcade while drinking gallons of Orange Julius and wishing I could muster up the courage to go talk to the cute girl who stood with her friends in the Listening Booth record store?
Wasn’t I the one who could go to rock concerts and then stay up to the wee hours of the morning talking to his friends about what would happen when we took on the world and made our dreams came true?
This song always makes me stop in my tracks whenever I hear it.
As we’ve seen with the hurricanes and Las Vegas tragedy along with the untimely death of one of my idols, Tom Petty, we’re only given a certain amount of time on this bouncing ball. My goal now is to try to make every moment count.
But I’m not here to bum you out on my birthday. Because in addition to being the one who drove to the mall and went to rock concerts, I was also the one who consistently laughed at his parents for being in their 40’s while I reveled in teenage glory.
There’s an odd sense of immortality you have when you’re young that makes you believe time will always stand still and that you’ll never be as old as your parents. But then you take a nap and wake up in that role.
What was it they said about karma?
go.Jimmy.go 
Happy Birthday, Jimmy. And, many more.
Just a suggestion … Next year, celebrate your 29th anniversary of your 18th birthday. That fits YOU much better.
Thanks Dale. That’s an excellent idea. From now on, that’s what I intend to do!
Happy Birthday! Being 46 is cooler than being a teenager these days anyway. 🙂
As a fellow 46 year old this year, congratulations on being cooler than most and always less cool than your children and their associates. I am most definitely going to take Dale’s advice, but perhaps celebrate the 26th anniversary of my 21st birthday instead. Might as well be “legal”. 😉
I like your idea Lori! I like it a LOT!! 🙂
Shortly before my 40th birthday, I stopped using what I now call the “annual retentive” system, because too much expectation was hung on its numbers: adulthood at 18, drinking age at 21, untrustworthy at 30, life begins at 40, retire at 65… now I celebrate my birth every 10 months. I turned 560 months in August.
I hear you on wondering how it is that you find yourself middle-aged… how it’s possible everyone else sees a middle-aged man when I’m clearly still in my early 20s. I just got a little wiser, that’s all.
Ok, and 80 lbs heavier, but that doesn’t REALLY matter, does it? Ack, turns out to women my age—that’s about 25—it does. I really have to watch that.
There’s an old Chico And The Man episode where they’re in a hospital, and this very old man starts flirting with a young, beautiful nurse, and she thinks it’s cute and walks away, and the old man says to the other guy, “She doesn’t see the 25-year-old inside.” Too true.