Twenty-Something

When I turned twenty-six, I had to get over the strange sensation of knowing that I was closer to thirty than I was to twenty. Thirty is the age when people are grown-ups and have things like careers and mortgages and spouses. Twenty has much less weighty associations, and by those standards, that’s still pretty solidly where I am.

But now that I’m even CLOSER to thirty (not quite there yet!), I have to marvel at how fast the time has gone. I still think of scholarly articles that were written in 1999 as being fairly recent—according to the five-year expiration date on scholarship, they are not. Not by a long shot. I still think of high school as not all that long ago, and it staggers me to think it’s been fully half of my life since I was a freshman!

And it’s not just things in relation to me that seem to have flown by either. My college first-year students are now upwards of an entire decade younger than I am. They call me by my last name like I’m some kind of authority figure (though I still have to dress up on the first day of class or they look at me like they can’t figure out what I’m doing behind the Teacher’s Desk). They were eight years old when 9-11 happened; they don’t really remember what it was like when you could accompany your loved one all the way to the very gate at the airport even if you weren’t flying. They don’t remember NOT being at war with Terror. (I don’t dwell at length on this sort of thing in my daily life; I just had it brought home to me when I gave my students a reading on post-9-11 political rhetoric and realized they’d never really heard anything but.) Heath Ledger stands in about the same relation to them—a Hollywood leading man who died too young, a long time ago—as James Dean does to me. They’re starting to look at CDs with the same wary mistrust as most of my generation looks at LPs. “Why don’t you just get it on iTunes?”

It all gives me a very odd sympathy for folks who have been around a heck of a lot longer than I have. If 20-some-odd years have gone by in the blink of an eye, I really can imagine waking up one day and realizing I’m 85 years old and I won’t know where the time has gone.

This is starting to sound rather negative, but I don’t mean it to. I feel blessed to have experienced every one of my 20-some-odd years, and I look forward, I hope, to experiencing many more, however fast they fly. I have ambitions to be one of those crazy cat ladies who wears purple dresses (make that trousers) and red hats—someone who loves her crow’s feet and her gray hair. (“Yeah,” my older friends smirk, “wait until your metabolism slows down to a crawl and you have arthritic knees and you turn into that person at the movies who keeps going, ‘What’d he say?’ to your neighbor: see how much you like getting old then.” Well, I’ve been warned that getting old ain’t for sissies. I hope I’ll prove not to be a sissy. I’m sure I’ll complain bitterly, but I hope I’ll like my wrinkles anyway.)

Birthdays have never been a particularly big deal in my household, any more than New Years. The last time I remember being particularly excited about a birthday was when I turned seven, and that was only because seven was (and, illogically, remains) my favorite number. Ever since I turned nineteen or so, the numbers don’t seem to have mattered much (except for these odd occasions when I have a reason to stop and marvel at how many years I’m wracking up without even trying).

Of course, I have had some memorable birthday parties, for good and bad. The best was probably my surprise birthday party when I turned ten. You wouldn’t believe the scheming and the cleverness that went into making that one happen! The worst may have been my twenty-first, when I spent all evening desperately studying for a test and writing a paper, all the while trying to keep the blood flowing through my legs in an inhuman New Hampshire January “cold snap.” My nineteenth birthday I got a fire-truck as a gift—unintentionally, of course (it involved trick candles and a dorm-wide fire alarm system: don’t ask). This birthday that just passed, I had a dessert party, which involved some lovely friends and probably about three weeks' worth of chocolate, licorice, and cheesecake. Three weeks' worth apiece, mind you. I probably won’t be able to handle something like that when I’m forty; I figured I should do it now while I can enjoy it.

This birthday has given me occasion to stop and notice how much things keep on changing in the world. But it doesn’t take a birthday to notice that; in fact, I noticed it long before my birthday, but this seemed like an appropriate post in which to bring it up. Birthdays, in my opinion, are really best celebrated not by serious reflection but, as I celebrated mine this year, with some good friends and as much chocolate as you can possibly handle in one sitting. Count the candles on the cake if you want to, but don’t count the calories until tomorrow.