I turn forty-five in a couple of weeks. Most years my birthday is
something I have a hard time caring much about. I don’t mind getting
older at all; The way I figure it, every year I get older is a year my
sister Erin didn’t get to have. Our family birthday celebrations are low
key, usually on a weekend before or after the actual day depending on
when everyone’s schedules come together. There will be dinner, a few
presents, usually a cake, and that’s about the extent of it. If news of
my birthday is discovered by students somehow, there are a few who will
make cards or do other little things to celebrate it -- the year I
turned forty some of my girls "borrowed" my masking tape so they could
make giant tape-letters of my last name on their backs and walk around
like that, jumping into the correct order throughout the day to show off
their spelling skills on demand.
I’ve mentioned my
inner fifteen-year-old occasionally here. The first time I realized I
even had an inner fifteen-year-old was sometime in my thirties. I’d been
living in my old townhouse a few years and decided the anemic
artificial Christmas tree I’d been using just wasn’t getting the job
done anymore. Since I don’t make a lot of decisions without first
thinking about them from eight different directions, I had spent a few
weeks thinking about exactly what kind of tree I’d want. One day while
shopping at Target I wandered past the holiday decorations and saw
something that had been brand new at the time: An L.E.D. Christmas tree,
plugged in and lit up with a rainbow of colors lazily swirling after
each other through the boughs. Part of me found it mesmerizing, part of
me was a little embarrassed to be mesmerized. I finally decided to buy
one, figuring that even if I wasn’t completely sold on the idea in that
moment, I really owed that tree to the younger version of myself who
would have been so pumped to know things like that were going to exist
in his future that he would have started stashing away money at fifteen
years old to make sure he could afford to buy one when the time came.
Now,
acknowledging that I have a fifteen-year-old self doesn’t necessarily
mean that I actively cater to his wants and needs. But there are certain
things about the life I have that he’d be pretty okay with. A few
examples:
*Knowing he would have a home office with a
widescreen computer on the desktop, and that he only had to spin his
chair ninety degrees to be sitting behind an electronic drum set would
have had him seeking out people to high-five.
*He
doesn’t have to scrimp and save his allowance to buy new cartridges for
the Atari, but can buy a new XBox game if it’s just a weekend afternoon
and he’s kind of bored.
*He doesn’t have to make mix
tapes for his cheap generic Walkman, and has an embarrassing amount of
music he can listen to pretty much anytime and anywhere. He can store
thousands of songs on the phone in his pocket, for crying out loud.
*Which brings up another point: If he had any idea smartphones were coming... wow....
*He
might not be thrilled to learn that about 30% of what’s left of his
hair is gray, but it would be easier to accept it once he pieced
together that he still had any hair at all past the age of thirty.
*He’d
love going to movies pretty much any time he wanted. Living within six
miles of close to forty movie screens would have been an embarrassment
of riches after a childhood of being trapped halfway between the Elk
Cinema and the Anoka Theater, each of which only showed one movie at a
time and didn’t always switch them out very frequently.
*He’d
be able to eat bacon whenever he wanted. That wouldn’t make it a good
idea and it certainly isn’t the way things ended up happening, but he’d
be very glad to know the option was always available.
*He’d
be relieved to know that 80% of his adult life would see him dressing
pretty much the same way he was back then. If someone removed the
t-shirts, sweatshirts, jeans and shorts from his adult wardrobe, he’d
have to do laundry a lot more frequently.
I could go on
with some more examples, but I’d think this is enough to make that
point that my life as it is today is something that would win the
approval of many fifteen-year-olds. The thing of it is though, my inner
fifteen-year-old would now be close to turning thirty. And since even
that dopey kid was too introspective for his own good, he’d be at an age
where he’d start wondering whether or not things were all going in the
right direction, or if maybe there had been points along the way where
he had just let the inertia of living catch up with him in such small
incremental steps that he wouldn’t notice until it was almost on top of
him.
To be clear, I’m not complaining about how
dissatisfying my life is. I know full well how fortunate I am with the
life I have and how blessed I am to share it with the people who
populate it. But this coming week is my sister Erin’s birthday; my least
favorite day of the year, but that's a different story. The last time
we were able to celebrate Erin's birthday with her was nine years ago. I
don’t know if there’s much about my life that’s changed in that time.
It occurs to me that if she were still alive today, I think she’d
recognize a lot of my 2013 life as the same collections of habits,
routines, and preferences that defined it was before she got sick.
Which
also has me thinking a lot these days: If this is all true, maybe there
should be an expiration date on getting away with living like this.
Maybe thirty years spent at fifteen is long enough. Maybe there's a
point when it’s time to take proactive steps to outpace that inertia....
