On September 25, yours truly just completed his fiftieth lap around the sun. That’s right folks, I’m fifty now. The big 5-0. Half a century. Fifty years old. Heck, I’m a full week older than Walt Disney World!
I don’t feel fifty. I certainly don’t act like I’m fifty. When I shave my grey chin whiskers, I don’t look fifty. Well, I didn’t think I looked fifty—until an incident occurred last week that made me question that belief.
I was sitting in my 2010 Chevrolet Camaro Super Sport after playing a round of disc golf at Albert-Oakland Park in Columbia when a pair of college guys parked beside me. One of the enthusiastic young lads said, “Nice car, dude!” I had been looking down at my phone, and after I looked over at the compliment-giver to say thank you, he quickly amended his initial statement. “I mean, nice car, sir.”
Of course the young whipper-snapper was just trying to show some respect for his elder, as his parents, (who are most likely my age,) taught him. But as I sat there in my “mid-life crisis”car, I couldn’t help feeling like I had been savagely attacked.
“Does that thing have a V-8?” the starry-eyed kid asked. I recovered from the initial blow quickly, (for a man of my advanced age,) and answered in the affirmative. The precocious youngster glanced back at his shiny new Hyundai, (no doubt bought by his elderly parents,) and said, “Oh, that’s cool. All my car has is great gas mileage.” I had absolutely no idea if that was another quasi-accidental insult or just a straight-up burn. Either way it hurt, almost as much as my elbow did after throwing a Frisbee around for an hour.
When I was in college, way back in the last millennium, I played one or two rounds of disc golf almost every single day. I don’t remember my elbow being sore back then. But how could I be expected to remember anything from those days? After all, we couldn’t count on Facebook memories popping up on our smartphones back then to remind us of all the things we’d forgotten about doing in past years. We didn’t have Facebook. We didn’t have smartphones. We didn’t have cell phones. And we walked to the course and back home again barefoot, uphill, and in a foot of snow—every single day.
On my birthday, my kids were discussing how the world has changed since I was born. One of them asked, “Was TV a thing when you were young?” I was flabbergasted. When I said that it was, one of them added, “Yeah, but it was probably black & white.”
I assured them that my family did in fact own a color television when I was a kid. I did not mention that we also had a black & white set, a rotary dial telephone that we RENTED from the phone company, and an honest-to-goodness outhouse in our backyard.
Fine, I’m old. But you know what? I’m actually okay with that.
Reaching fifty years of age is a major milestone to be sure. Quite frankly, I never expected to live this long. For about half my life, I lived by the motto: “I’d rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy.” The irony is that I drank so much alcohol that I effectively lobotomized myself. The truth is, had I not decided to quit drinking almost five years ago, I might not have made it to fifty.
At age fifty, I have a smoking-hot wife to whom I have been happily married for twenty-five years. At age fifty, I have two sons, a daughter, and a one-year-old granddaughter—all of whom I love beyond measure. At age fifty, I have more friends than I can count and many more than I deserve. At age fifty, I have a small fleet of cars and trucks—including a trophy-winning Camaro SS that some people might think is a “midlife crisis” car, but because I’ve been having midlife crises since I was in my 20s, it’s more of an “I made it to fifty and by god I deserve to drive whatever the hell I want” car.
Yes, I’m fifty—and I’m fantastic.
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