Today's Lesson: Age IS a number.
Corollary Lesson: Fuck numbers.
I know. You have a birth date. It's written on your driver's license, you often use it as your password (note: BAD IDEA), and it is the one thing about you that will absolutely NEVER change. I mean, as you get older, the things you find important fall away, you get new friends, new hairstyles, you change your height, weight, skin care regimen, but you never change the day you came into existence into this world.
As of a few weeks ago, I have completed 40 revolutions around the sun in this meat shell. I took a moment - in between swigs or smokes or songs or slurpy smooches - to think about what I was doing at the other decade markers of my life.
In 1981, I turned 10 years old. I had finished the third grade, and it was my favorite grade year of my adolescence thus far. This was largely due to a teacher I had whom I absolutely loved. She was single and zany and wore smoky glasses and hippie skirts and laughed every day. She became friends with my grandmother, and she attended my dance recitals and plays. She encouraged me to sew and sing and read and just try everything out. A few years later she adopted a girl and became a single mom. She was my first exposure to second wave feminism, and the concept that a woman could be kick ass independent and still find joy in every day things. I needed that. I was a stressed out little girl. I was the defacto "adult" in my family when it came to things like administering medications to family members (both human and feline), keeping everyone's schedules, running from class to dance rehearsals, packing every week to shuttle between my house and my grandmother's...it was a lot to deal with. I don't even remember having a birthday that year. At that time, all the birthday parties kind of meshed together. I remember cakes, and pool parties, and my cat killing a snake and gifting it at my feet as I opened presents. But I don't remember specific years.
In 1991, I turned 20 years old. How the times have changed. I had quit school. I had left home. I was holding down two part-time jobs, neither of which paid very much. I was living in Allston, having just moved into my first solo, one-bedroom apartment, after spending 16 months with roommates. Over the course of those 16 months, I had delved into massive alcohol and drug abuse, risky emotional and sexual behaviors that on the surface described all the markers of low self-esteem, but which I called "exploration of consciousness". I was having the best time I could under the circumstances. I was nowhere near "rock bottom", but at that point in the early 90s, we in Generation X wanted to party our way right down there, just to prove we could climb the fuck back out the next day. I knew that this spot, this new place that I would call my own, would be the turning point. Having to take care of myself, even if I wasn't fully ready, was what I needed to do. By the time I turned 21, I had a full-time job that more than doubled my yearly salary. I had started a writers group/salon that fed our souls once a week. My demons were still very much there, and I still risked way too much in that first apartment, but I now had the tools to deal with it, because I just had to. There was no net, and I needed to take control.
In 2001, I turned 30 years old. I recall when I was very young, when I learned how to read calendars, calculating the year that I would turn 30. I'd always kept 2001 in my mind. However, when it arrived, it wasn't cause for a celebration. I was, again, unemployed. I had spent the better part of six months acting like a celebutard, staying out very late in the evenings (often into the next day), with other folks who had the summer off or generally didn't do the day job thing. I had spent the last few years "on a break" from all things artistic - no music, no theatre, nothing. My life was sleeping in and going out. It was my way of coping. My father was diagnosed with cancer earlier that year, and by the summer he needed someone to be there for him. Luckily, I seemed to have some free time on my hands. I spent 10 days in August with him, hanging out, having pancakes and milkshakes for dinner, drinking shots with beer backs at Vic's, smoking, all the things you aren't supposed to do when you're dying. He got upset when we were driving somewhere and he forgot his hat. He was now bald and looked much older than 62 (he would turn 63 three days before I turned 30). We talked football, watched a lot of TV, and I had started making a bedazzled shirt to wear for my upcoming birthday party. It was a black and grey baseball shirt with a large "30" on the front and back. A few days after my 30th birthday was the attack on the World Trade Center. I was still wearing the "30" shirt. Six months after that, my mother and sister called to tell me my dad was not going live much longer. We made a plan to head to Hospice to be with him in the morning. I went out and got thoroughly wasted. My dad died that night. I put his hat in the coffin with him.
In 2011, I turned 40 years old. I am employed, gainfully, in a job I truly enjoy. I have been living on my own for two decades. I have allowed theatre back into my life, and am doing pretty well with it, even having stood on stage in front of people without accidentally vomiting on them. The demons are still around, but they've been a bit domesticated. They don't get to go outside without me keeping them on a leash. I have fantastic, caring, artsy friends, and my family is closer than ever. I can truly say that, right now, I'm at the best point in my life so far.
I say so far, because just a short time after my 40th birthday, my sister and I joined our mother for her (very belated) 50th high school reunion. My mother, to me, has always been the spitfire. The ageless one. At 73 years old, she runs circles around people half her age (including me). So we were expecting my tiny dynamo mother to be the only one walking unassisted to the reunion, whereas her classmates would be sporting the latest in Hoveround technology and oxygen tank fashion. Jesus, we could not be more incorrect. The class of 1957 was kicking! I mean, mostly. If there is one statistic to take, it's this: my mother's high school had recently gone co-ed, and thusly, there were 12 male gradutes. Of those 12, 8 had passed on. Whereas out of the 140 or so female graduates, only about 20 had passed. (note: there were still about 40 "missing", so even if the total number of deceased is 60, it's still a far lesser percentage for the ladies than for the gentlemen).
But, getting back to the kickin' ladies and gentlemen of '57. They were fit and frosty. Stylish. Wearing heels and appropriate makeup and hip hair cuts. They are retired, they are traveling, they are working, they do theatre and films. They are grandmothers and great grandmothers. Some are going through their late-life crises post-divorce (ahem, gentlemen of '57). They laughed and reminisced and relayed all the stories that my mom used to tell us of her wild days in high school. We met her high school sweetheart, whose heart she broke when he wanted commitment and she wanted college.
As my sister and I were looking through the dance cards a classmate had saved, and reading about how all the kids stayed out until 1:30 AM after the dance, one graduate mentioned, "We stayed out late, but we didn't do anything crazy. We all just went out with each other and had so much fun together. It's not like today, everything's so serious."
I was so glad to be a guest at the reunion, to get that kind of rare perspective. The reminiscing of the earlier generation to a time that I can also relate to, and to think about the decades afterwards and the ones still to come. I think back to when I was younger, and honestly believing that for some reason, be it my own mistakes or some horrible tragedy, that I would not see the age of 40. But now that this number is realized, I can throw all the others away and start counting again.
