On birthdays and suckface

Definitely in the upper tier of fan letters

This morning we drive a big silver stake through the concept of fun birthdays. There’s no more 16. Eighteen’s dust. Twenty-one, and getting carded at the Delano on Miami Beach, is misty watercolored. We’re down to round decades. When I say I’m in my 30s now I’ll get lumped in with the 44-year-olds who claim to be 38, but at least I’m no longer trapped in the same conversation with kids who were born in the early ‘90s, who should get off my lawn already.

The notion of aging shifts as a person plows through his or her 20s. When I was 23, I dared not imagine life as a rickety 26-year-old. Now the years have leveled off into something akin to the Amazon River basin, in which the earth tilts only slightly, and 30 looks like 40 is a sneeze away from 50 and so on. “When I was your age,” my father told me yesterday, “you were 5.” I told him my children, hypothetical as they remain, are simply late bloomers. But if you wait later than your parents did to start cranking out a litter, your folks become much more sympathetic characters. When their parents die, as my grandparents nearly all did during my 20s, they become closer still. We all get leveled off, and as such, we see that, as Kurt Vonnegut’s son once wrote to him, We’re all in this thing together, whatever it is.

I’m also moving this week, cross-continent, and have been dredging my possessions for days. When a box of letters popped open, I noticed some long-forgotten handwriting. At my first full-time newspaper job, writing for the features section of Florida Today, the big daily for the Cape Canaveral area, we writers would occasionally receive feedback in the form of handwritten letters. (My favorite was one that, apropos of nothing I’d written, extolled the virtues of bathtub Dr. Pepper … cause, you know, why buy it at the store when you can make it at home?) No reader of ours was more prolific than Rev. Bill Dickgraber (pronounced Duh-GRAY-bur), known in the office for writing over-friendly if entertaining notes. My first Dickgraber letter arrived after to a story I’d written about a “prom” at a nursing home, wherein the grown children of a very old man surprised him by bringing over his nearly as old girlfriend from a nearby nursing home. When the couple saw each other, they kissed passionately, oblivious to the party watching them, seeing only one another, fending off death for another day, or perhaps just another hour, with a life-affirming bit of suckface. The story’s kicker came via the employee who quipped that chaperoning this prom was cake, because you knew afterwards everyone would just fall asleep.

Rev. Bill picked up on this scene, and took the opportunity to offer one of the most optimistic forecasts of ageing that I’ve ever read. “I have always … uneasily … wondered what went on within the minds of centurions,” he wrote, ellipses his. “But then again at one time being 60 seemed somewhere … far … VERY far away. I’m happy to report that (with 60 being one month away) the older me gets the more women become BEAUTIFUL. Incredibly … I can remember when 24 yr. old ladies seemed like old hags.”

This seems like a non-dirtbag corollary to the “Dazed and Confused” line delivered by Matthew McConaughey: “That’s what I love about these high school girls, man. I get older; they stay the same age.” The older you get, you realize how many people actually are the same age, or thereabouts.