I’m a little late for my annual birthday essay this year. It’s only partly because I wasn’t sure how to handle this one. 51 is a number that doesn’t immediately lend itself to clever prose, although my sister pointed out to me that “51 backwards is only 15.” So, okay, that’s cool.
The important thing about having reached this particular age is that it means absolutely nothing to me on a personal level. I have by now reached well beyond the mid-point of my anticipated life span, yet this fact does not bother me. That’s probably because I’m still a number (10, give or take) of years away from giving retirement any serious thought. In ten years my girls will be in or on the cusp of their college years, and that’s about the time I will begin considering living on a fixed income.
So 51 is not a milestone. It’s not a nice, round number like 50, which always sounds more impressive than it really is. Neither is it 60, which is when I won’t mind those senior discounts so much. Physically I have parts of me (my brain, for example) that refuse to accept that I am no longer 25. The rest of my body (literally) feels every one of those 51 years now. Especially, and I know precisely how cliché this sounds, when the weather changes. Mrs. Woody and I both have internal barometers that tell us better than any analog or digital weather station when the barometric pressure is changing. We can’t tell whether it’s going up or down, but we can tell you it’s moving.
Mentally, though, I don’t feel the chronological advances. I have what is probably an unfortunate tendency to gauge myself against my Dad when it comes to aging. Dad for me always epitomized the “grown up” male figure. He was nearly always larger than life from my perspective. And I’ve never seemed to measure up.
I will say, however, that when I catch my reflection at certain angles these days, I see parts of Dad staring back at me. My hands, for example. Even now, looking at them while they type, they’re not Dad-like hands. Yet, in the mirror I can see those big, beefy hands that were one of Dad’s defining physical characteristics. In fact, my arms, when I see them in profile, remind me forcefully of Dad, especially when he was conducting.
So how else to define what this birthday meant to me? The best way, really, would be to describe how we chose as a family to celebrate it this year:
We went to San Diego.
A couple of years ago, my birthday celebration was a day at Disneyland. That was fun, but it was only the one day. This year we did a long weekend that included Friday and Monday. We visited Sea World, took a tour of San Diego Harbor, visited the Fleet Science Center, hit the San Diego Zoo, and did probably our first and last visit to Legoland on the way home.
I haven’t been that tuckered out in months. But it was fun every single day, and we got to see lots of neat stuff.
Which, for me, is precisely why I’m not worried about 51. When Dad was 51 I was never sure that he was actually enjoying the places we visited as a family. This was probably because of Dad’s propensity for grousing whenever normal humans were otherwise having fun. Take Disneyland, for example. Dad apparently loved Disneyland. Yet, aside from “Pirates of the Carribean,” I don’t recall Dad ever having ridden anything that involved less-than-dignified entertainment value. I, on the other hand, went on at least three different rides with my daughters yesterday at Legoland, including one that takes the rider and puts him or her in various, decidedly undignified poses, including upside-down, so that my blood was not restored to normal circulation (“sluggish”) for at least seven hours. And what’s more, I enjoyed them.
51? I can handle it.
