Four-Oh

Today is my 40th birthday. Spent a good deal of the weekend celebrating, actually. Kristine and I went out for a nice dinner and a movie Saturday; yesterday we met my sister and a friend of hers for lunch as they were passing though the area, and she laid a very tasty cake on me; last night Kristine cooked me a "special birthday dinner," and who knows, there might even be another one of those in the works.

I don't have any great remorse about the number itself. I don't feel that I'm abruptly losing something, or drastically changing somehow. But I am a little confused about what lies ahead. Some time ago, it occurred to me that I didn't know how to be middle aged. All I knew was being young, or at least what being young was at the time when I was young. My frame of reference remained that of a student or an aspiring young professional, despite racking up a marriage, a mortgage, and more than ten years of a teaching career. As the years went on, I could relate less and less to my students, yet I didn't feel much closer to my elders.

I have the notion that, in my parents' time, the paths for one's life were more clearly marked out. There was a certain condition of middle class responsibility and comfort you aspired to and settled into when you had the means and the stability. Youth prepared you for that. But today, it's often remarked that childhood, or adolescence, extends longer than it did a generation ago. Some of that may be due to economic necessity: people may require a longer period of dependence on their parents for support or shelter before establishing themselves. But some of it is because as people age, they want to carry their youth, or youthful interests, with them whether in the form of music, Disney cartoons, Hello Kitty gear, Xbox games, or whatever. Aging becomes a project of accomodating those habits and interests into new circumstances, of, in short, remaning hip. My parents, or any parents of my friends, were never encumbered with that concern.

And that's where it may go well for me. My purchase on hipness slipped away ages ago, and was never that firm to begin with. I may not know how to be middle aged, but I wasn't that great at being young either, at least if being young is about friendships, spontaneity, hedonism, and self-exploration. I got through youth by trial and error, improvising as I went along, and the results were usually tolerable. That strategy is a part of being young I can carry with me as I age. Honestly, I'm not sure what alternatives there are.