Age & Life, Vol. 1

On August 25, I celebrated my 39th birthday. I’ve heard that 39 is an awful year—particularly as one nears the end of it. I have been determined to embrace my age every year and grow old as gracefully as possible. I suppose my thought is that there’s nothing I can do about getting old, so I might as well make peace with it.

Well, that’s all very nice. The truth is that I’m afraid if I really looked long and hard at what it means to, as Paul puts it, “suck up the last year of being in your 30s,” I might have an existential meltdown from which I’d never recover.

It wasn’t that long ago that I was whining in one journal or another about having nothing to show for my life: no screenplays made into feature films, no Great American Novels, no home or land that I own, no children, no love-of-my-life… It was then that I really felt my age! What milestones, what badges of honor had I accumulated since turning 21—besides crow’s feet and a few new sprouts of gray hair?

Now that I’ve gotten married, I can rest on the accomplishment of finding a man who can put up with me. Well done. Babies? If any of them are forthcoming, they will certainly be something I can happily leave behind when I die (assuming they’re decent human beings).

As for my writing, I can’t say what will happen. Perhaps it is this constant work at being a writer that makes me feel younger than I really am; that work is the same work I’ve been doing for over 20 years. I’m still sitting at this desk, still creating, still networking… I could be 22. Or 28. Or 35.

There’s much more to say on this age topic, particularly as it pertains to how late in life I’ve gotten married and chosen to start a family. It deserves its own entry, however, so stay tuned…