go.Jimmy.go

Did something happen while I was sleeping?

Seriously. Was there some sort of meeting I wasn’t invited to where everyone collectively decided to get old?

Because I swear to God, it happened overnight.

One minute we were young, staying out until two in the morning, eating whatever we wanted and waking up the next day ready to do it all over again.

Now I can hurt myself sleeping.

A few nights ago, while scrolling through Facebook—which, let’s face it, is probably a sign that I’m getting old—I came across a picture of someone I hadn’t seen in years.

He’s a year older than me and was one of my brother’s best friends growing up on Southside. He lived a few blocks from us, and was pretty much a permanent fixture of my childhood.

I remember standing on the corner next to Brother Brights store with him every morning waiting for the big yellow school bus to carry us off to another exciting day of Easton Area education. And by “exciting,” I mean staring out the window and wondering how many hours remained until I could come home.

I also remember those Sunday afternoons when he and my brother would round up every kid they could find in the neighborhood for a game of tackle football.

And I mean tackle football.

No helmets. No pads. No concussion protocols. No adults standing around making sure everyone was properly hydrated. Just a bunch of kids with a chewed up NeRF football knocking the living hell out of each other on Mr. Ganssle’s lawn and somehow surviving.

Good times.

Eventually, as usually happens in life, everyone eventually went their separate ways. I went off to college to study music. My brother’s friend moved to Florida and got into construction.

It was the late 1980s.

We were young.

Our chiseled abs hadn’t been buried behind excessive weight yet.

Our knees worked.

We could get off the floor without making a noise.

Life’s possibilities seemed endless.

Then I saw his profile photo on Facebook.

There he was, sitting on a couch wearing a T-shirt and worn blue jeans. A Ford Racing baseball cap sat on his head, just like I remembered.

He didn’t look sick. He didn’t look unhealthy. For all I knew, the guy could easily beat me in a five mile run, and have the cardiovascular system of a Navy SEAL.

But something was different.

For the first time in my life, I looked at him and thought:

He’s an old man.

Then came the absolute horrifying realization:

Wait! He’s only a year older than me! Son of a bitch.

That meant there was an excellent chance somebody was scrolling through Facebook at that very moment, stumbling across one of my pictures and thinking the exact same thing.

“Wow. Jimmy got old.”

Excuse me?

I prefer distinguished.

Besides, I don’t consider myself old. I consider myself a fifteen-year-old trapped inside the body of a man who occasionally needs both hands to get out of a recliner.

There’s a difference.

Of course, the evidence against me is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore.

There are more than a few gray hairs in my beard. My knees occasionally sound like someone stepping on a bag of potato chips. I’ve reached the age where I get excited about finding a good parking spot. Naps have become an important part of my daily routine (have to thank my grandparents for that one).

And I’ve also discovered there are few things more dangerous after fifty than looking down and noticing something on the floor that needs to be picked up.

You don’t just bend over anymore. Instead, when you drop something on the floor, you evaluate the situation.

“How badly do I really need that?”

Sometimes the answer is no.

Leave it there.

The house belongs to the object now, unless it’s edible. In which case, a dog will eventually discover it.

But the strangest part of getting older isn’t what happens to your body. It’s what happens to time.

Those Sunday afternoon Southside football games don’t feel like they happened more than forty years ago. Neither do those freezing mornings standing on the corner waiting for the school bus.

In my mind, they’re still right there.

I can drive past those same places today and see everything exactly as it was.

The houses.

The yards.

My brother.

His friends.

Me.

And the cool thing is, we’re never old in those memories. We’re always kids.

That’s probably why seeing someone from your childhood after many years can be so jarring. Your brain has preserved them in some little mental time capsule. Then Facebook comes along and says, Surprise! Here’s what forty years did to everybody.

If I saw my brother’s friend today, though, I’m sure it wouldn’t take long before the years disappeared.

We’d laugh about those football games. We’d talk about standing outside freezing our asses off waiting for the bus. We’d remember Mr. Lucey’s penny candy, Brother Brights big smile, how great Barney’s Cheesesteaks were, and people we haven’t thought about in decades.

Only now we’d probably talk about it over a couple of beers instead of Tropical Punch flavored Kool-Aid.

And at some point during the conversation, one of us would undoubtedly say something horrifying like:

“You realize we’re older now than our parents were back then?”

That’s the sentence nobody prepares you for.

Because when I was a kid, my parents were old. I mean, ancient.

They knew things like mortgage rates and property taxes. They watched the news voluntarily. They complained about the thermostat. They fell asleep watching television.

Wait a minute.

Oh, hell.

I’ve become them.

I’ve always had this strange ability to see people as they were rather than as they are. When I run into someone I knew from high school, I certainly notice the gray hair, wrinkles and everything else Father Time has graciously bestowed upon us.

But somewhere underneath all of it, I still see the kid. And I suppose that’s how I see myself too.

Somewhere inside this fifty-something-year-old body with the questionable knees and the increasing appreciation for an afternoon nap is the little boy standing on the corner waiting for the school bus.

He’s still there.

He just has his own mortgage now.

….and reading glasses.

….and cholesterol numbers.

And if he plays tackle football on Sunday afternoon, there’s a pretty good chance he’ll be calling out sick from work on Monday.

Maybe that’s what getting older really is. We don’t feel ourselves aging because we’re here for every second of it. The changes happen slowly. Quietly. One gray hair, one wrinkle, one mysterious ache at a time.

Until one day you see an old friend sitting on a couch wearing a Ford Racing hat and think:

Man, he got old.

And then you remember he’s your age.

That’s when you close Facebook, walk into the bathroom, look into the mirror and realize something you probably should have figured out a long time ago.

Everybody else didn’t get old.

I did too.

And somehow, impossibly, that kid waiting for the school bus came along for the entire ride.

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My new novel, The Seventh Echo is available now from 
Adverse City Publishing
© 2026 James Wood