Getting Older

Getting older is weird.  Because I don't feel old, really, I just feel like me.  In my mind my college experience wasn't that long ago, but it really was.  My high school just had a 30 year reunion.  I remember my high school self, so that doesn't seem distant, but the numbers don't lie.

I think about how when I was in elementary school I couldn't understand why people referred to kids in high school as "kids" since they sure looked like adults to me.  Now even college kids seem very young.  And what used to sound "old" doesn't seem all that old now.  When I was a kid, 50 sounded very old.  Today I have trouble seeing 60 as particularly old, but that's getting into retirement age for many so I guess I have to accept that fact.  I think about how my grandfather was 70 when he died, and that seemed okay at the time because he was an old man, but now I find it shocking he died so young.

The really sobering markers of aging aren't the ones I was expecting.  It's the odd bits of change and history that slowly slip by rendering all your memories out of step.  Realizing news events from my childhood that resonated with me are completely unfamiliar to many of the people I talk to on a daily basis is disconcerting.  I have to explain to my kids things like the eruption of Mt St Helens or the Iran hostage crisis or the Challenger explosion.  Those are peripheral tidbits that don't necessarily come up in school.  But they sound as ancient to them as my dad talking about seeing the Beatles at Shea Stadium or people describing when Kennedy was shot did to me.