At Sixty, I Finally Reach Middle Age

I think I was thirtysomething until I was well past forty eight, maybe forty nine. It was probably getting that AARP invitation that finally jolted me through the forties in a instant and slapped a restraining order on my age awareness. I was suddenly shy around younger people and started having odd thoughts like : "Gosh, I wonder if this is the last baseball game I will ever see." And that was when I was fifty.

Then I realized that I hadn't reached middle age, I was beginning to believe that I was past it, that, worse, I was at the end of my life. It's very difficult to enjoy a ball game when thoughts like that are coursing through your synapses. It slows everything down and speeds everything up only at moments when you want the opposite to be happening. "Hey, you repeatedly and pathetically say, where is the freeze frame button on this life?"

Then, one day after work, you decide to walk a little farther to the subway and two years later, sixty pounds lighter and averaging twenty miles a week running, you find yourself right back where you were - moving along with all the thirtysomethings and the forty-somethings and the fifty-somethings even though you yourself have reached your middle age.