In which I ramble on about getting older.
Work tonight was perfectly paced. Never got behind, never got ahead, just one call or call-back or chat presented itself at a time, all in an orderly fashion. Usually it’s not like that, it’s either banging or totally dead. I guess I liked it; appeals to my Libran sense of… appropriateness, I guess. A place for everything and everything in its place and all that. Orderly.
This morning I walked to catch the bus for work. A man was walking along the sidewalk toward me, on the inside. As we drew abreast, he stopped suddenly with a slap of his feet because there were branches in his path and he didn’t want to swerve into my lane. I smiled vaguely at him, and he shrugged and smiled back, almost coquettishly, and I realized a moment later that I’d seen him as a person, not as an old man. I saw boyishness in his presentation of himself to me, and knew that he’d interacted with me as a peer even though he was probably half again my age, if not more.
Ten years ago, he would have been an old man to me, some inscrutable thing outside of my experience. More an iconic representation of the idea of old-manness than a real human being. But lately I’m looking at the people around me and realizing they all feel like they did when they were twenty, but they’re trapped in bodies that are forty or sixty or eighty. I see the boy the man used to be and the girl the woman used to be now, not just an old person.
I think it started with Gramma. She’s 46 years older than I am, but still giggles like a girl under the right circumstances. She’s told me stories about her life, and I see that her sense of self is much like mine is: she still feels like herself, but then she looks down at her hands and notices they’re the hands of some mysterious old lady. She says things sometimes just like a woman in her prime would, and I have come to realize that one’s sense of self doesn’t seem to change much beyond, say, 30 or so – though our bodies certainly do.
I am now getting permanent wrinkles on my face. My hair is both turning silver and thinning. I even have a varicose vein, of all fucking things. And yet I still feel like… me. Whoever that is.
I suppose I always thought that older people were different than me, that their perceptions of both themselves and the world around them were as different from mine as mine were from my own when I’d been two or three. I think I’m somewhat disappointed, actually, that the evolution of my self seems to have stopped. I expected 40 (well, almost) to feel as different from 20 as 20 did from 10, but it doesn’t. I just feel like me. I have more memories and I’m somewhat quicker on the uptake, but that’s really about it.
Oh, hell, I can’t figure out what I’m trying to relate. I suspect everyone else rather already knew about this – that a person is a person is a person, regardless. I have nothing profound to reveal, other than the fact that I must be realizing my own life’s more or less half over, and that old people no longer seem all that damned old.
Well, that and the shocking realization that 20-year-olds are now, for the most part, total fucking aliens (a feeling I never expected to feel). Honestly, though, I suppose I’m mostly just pissed about the hair thing. And that 20-year-old bodies are TOTALLY wasted on 20-year-olds, holy shit, can I get a witness?
I took this picture with my cell yesterday. It’s March and this is what’s happening outside. Spring!
