After whining I’ll buck up and put on my black socks
Published 1:30 am Friday, May 3, 2024
Dawn broke cold, and it broke hard on Bainbridge Island this morning—July 22, 2005. Rain clouds moved in and blotted out the sun, like an old gray aunt arriving unexpectedly to dampen summer plans. No warming sun would shine on this most bleak of days.
The crack my left knee makes when I swing myself out of bed reverberates like the first thunderclap of the Apocalypse. There would be no joy in Mudville today, the Latte Guy is turning 50. That’s right, a half-century. Two score and ten. How does it feel to join the ranks of the certifiably old? You know those bubbly, tanned, skinny, healthy older people who merrily chirp about life beginning at 50, or 50 being the new 30?
Well, sorry, but they don’t know what they’re talking about. Anyone who claims to be happy about turning 50 is either a bald-faced liar or delusional. (Sorry, I shouldn’t use the word “bald” around old people like me). I think I’ll skip the birthday party this year. I don’t need a party to celebrate my official entry into my Declining Years; I need a wake for My Lost Youth.
Birthday parties are for young people, not museum artifacts like me. The proper way to recognize turning 50 is to retire to a darkened bedroom to watch the evening news wearing mismatched flannel pajamas and bifocals—bifocals that you had in your hand just a minute ago but now can’t seem to locate, which is OK because you just forgot whatever it was that you thought you needed your glasses for in the first place.
Celebrating birthdays as a younger man usually involved an entire afternoon spent playing basketball or hiking uphill in the rain, followed by an all-night poker game, interrupted only by a midnight run to Hollywood for a couple of Tommyburgers and another box of Lucky Lagers in the 11-ounce bottles with little puzzles under the twist-off caps, followed by a dawn visit to the Pantry in Los Angeles where you could eat a huge breakfast of potatoes and eggs and thick-sliced sourdough toast on a plate the size of a manhole cover with steaming coffee served in heavy ceramic mugs by ex-con waiters while sitting next to truck drivers, pimps and all-night flower mart workers who really didn’t give a rodent’s behind how old you were or why you had an ace of spades taped to the inside of your forearm.
If celebrating birthdays is just another part of the circle of life, then I fear that I have just rounded the final curve and am headed into the home stretch, my bifocals and Viagra bouncing out of the ink-stained pocket of my double-knit Sans-a-belt slacks and my sensible Hush Puppy loafers and black socks, shuffling along in what I foolishly believe to be a brisk trot, but which actually appears to the casual observer to be a lurching and lumbering death march.
There. I’ve gotten that out of my system, and I feel better. It’s time to buck up and get on with it. Turning 50 may be no walk in the park, but, as my dad would often say, it sure beats the alternative.
Many great Americans never had the opportunity to turn 50. John Kennedy died at 46. His brother Robert made it only to 43. Martin Luther King was killed when he was 39. Elvis died at 42. Sylvia Plath checked out at 31, Marilyn Monroe at 36. The English poet John Keats died at 36, and Mozart at 35, and although neither Keats nor Mozart was a great American, I don’t think we should hold that against them.
Me? I’ve got my health, my family and friends, my dog, a steady job doing interesting and important work, and the beginnings of a truly spectacular farmer’s tan. Who could ask for anything more? So no more whining from me. Until I hit 60, that is. Boy, now that’s really old. But who knows, maybe by then 60 will be the new 50.
Tom Tyner of Bainbridge Island writes a weekly humor column for this newspaper. This is from his “Classics” file.
