The BIG Five-Oh

It's the day after my birthday, and the big 50 has just whooped me upside the head. Well, it was gentle whoop, it's not like I hadn't seen it coming. The strange thing about being 49 was how long it seemed to last. I cannot for the life of me remember a year that seemed to pass so slowly. Maybe when you are facing a milestone as intimidating as this one, a rare subset of Einstein's theory of relativity takes effect, and you can spend a little time enjoying the very last year of your young life. I am now officially old. I do not look old (with the exception of the grey I've adopted so fondly in my beard), I do not feel old (with the exception that everything hurts some of the time, or something hurts most of the time), but I am, nonetheless, now old. I can hear my peers howling even as they read this, but they know damn well they are old too. Only I think that there is a new definition of old nowadays that dispenses with many of the assumptions of those not faced with having lived this long. It aint such a bad thing. My life is not over by a long shot. I am fairly healthy, and I would be in pretty good shape if I got off my butt more often and exercised. The only thing that really keeps me from worrying so much about that is the exercise I get at work and in the wife's garden projects at home. It's the tobacco that really has an impact on my overall health, but that's another story altogether. Needless to say, being 50 these days has a whole new look and feel to it that isn't half bad, if I may say so myself.
My sweetheart took me out to Olive Garden to celebrate and it was truly an enjoyable meal. Then we came home and watched a movie. It was a Jennifer Lopez, Richard Gere number called "Shall we dance." The guy is having something of a mid-life crisis, aka "Have I done everything I wanted to?" type of angst, and he ends up taking ballroom dancing lessons. It's all rather innocent, actually, but of course he doesn't tell the wife, and eventually she thinks he's having an affair and sics a private detective on him. Anyway, somewhere in the movie, the old quote, "Most men live lives of quiet desperation" came up, and the wife turns to me and asks, "What about you, are YOU living a life of quiet desperation?" Christ, in all honesty, how could I answer a loaded question like that? I never made it aboard the Calypso, haven't hand glided yet, never got to Australia, hell, I still haven't and doubt I ever will make it onboard a cruise ship. There are literally hundreds of things I wish I had done, wish I COULD do, but feel like my chances of ever doing them lessen with each passing year. These days I have attempted to balance these longings with being happy with what I have achieved.....the love of a good woman, a halfway decent roof over my head, never having gone hungry, a job that while trying to kill me gives me some quality time off to recover from....hell, things could be allot worse. My wife seems hellbent on assuming the middle aged crazies HAS to hit me sooner or later, no matter how much I try to assure her I haven't the strength to even consider it, but I can understand her fear, especially when I talk wistfully of hiking in Denali National Park or what it would be like to just chuck it all and move back to Alaska. Hopefully, she'll give me some credit for being happy with her before that heart attack nails me or some drunk in an SUV swerves into my lane. I love her to death.
So this is my ode to my first half-century on planet Earth. What a long, strange trip it's been. The second half, I'm sure, has things in store for me I can only imagine, but that's just half the fun of it. All I ask now is they find a better way to glue dentures in. It's the 21st century, for Christ's sake, you'd think if they could put a man on the moon........