Reflections on Turning Fifty

Here is some stream of consciousness about turning fifty, without editing or correction of typos, of which I am sure there will be plenty.

This morning, I woke up to discover that I have lived half a century. Having been all the ages younger than fifty, I know what it feels like, and you know what? It doesn’t feel terribly different that being forty, or even thirty. Sometimes, like when I watch that brand new Star Wars trailer, I feel like I’m still twelve.

But in reality, half a century is a long time, and I’ve seen a lot.

I’ve seen wars, and I’ve seen peace. I’ve seen economic booms and I’ve seen the great recession. I’ve made a killing in the stock market, and I lost a great deal in the market.

I went to college, and then went to grad school and it didn’t work out. That’s when I learned life isn’t scripted. I went to grad school again only to discover the degree was just a trophy.

I held my cousin Michelle in my arms when she was an infant. She is married and has kids of her own now. I got to know my maternal grandfather the longest of all his grandchildren in terms of years, and I miss him terribly. To me, he was the first family member who died.

I look back on all the mistakes I made as a youth and wonder how I survived. Then, I look at my kids and see them make some of the same mistakes, knowing nothing I can say or do can convince them the way getting beat up by life convinces a person.

I’m old enough to have watched men walking on the moon on television, and not just once. I remember Watergate as this annoying babble on the radio adults used to want to listen to instead of music. I remember watching black and white television and thinking nothing of it, but we had a color television in time to see Oscar the Grouch was origianlly orange. I still can see the Marlboro man riding his horse over the hills to the sound of “The Magnificent Seven,” cigarette dangling from his mouth.

I worked as a late-teenager in a smoke-filled factory where half the employees chain-smoked their entire shift and thought nothing of it. I remember seeing a news story on television about the death of one of the few remaining World War I veterans dying, and I remember my mother telling me there aren’t many of them left in the same voice I now use to say that about World War II veterans to my own children.

I remember hearing about the death of the last person alive during the Civil War. I remember Nixon triumphant in China, and in disgrace a few years later. I remember the television sitcom “Carter Country,” which took place in the town of Clinton Corners, and thinking how ironic it was they called a future presidental race. I remember watching Flipper regularly, and Speed Racer, and Lassie.

I suffered through the most horrific allergies and asthma, and I learned to live with it. I became a varsity athlete anyway, and lettered in Gymnastics in both high school and college.

The first movie I saw in the theater was “Chitty-chitty Bang Bang,” even though my grandparents intended us to see “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.” I remember when they still ran cartoon shorts before the movies. I was especially fond of “The Mighty Heroes,” the name of which I only learned after Google allowed me to research it by searching for “Rope Man Diaper Man.”

I remember the school environment of conformity, and being treated poorly because I was my own person and didn’t play that game. I look around now and see exactly the same thing on the internet and I think how sad.

I remember thinking forty is really old, and now feel like fifty is pretty young. I remember hearing at age twenty how a fifty year old woman was beautiful when at that age all I could see was old. Today, I see the beautiful fifty year old woman and that twenty year old girl looks like a toddler to me. It’s all perspective.

I remember when my middle school friend’s parents brought home the game PONG. It changed everything. A few years later, we had an Atari console. How far we had come. As a college student, I remarked how incredible and lifelike the computer games out kids would play would be, and I was understating.

I remember hating phone numbers with a 8,9 and 0 in them because that stupid rotor took forever to get back to the home position so you could dial the next number. I remember seeing Louis Armstrong on television. I remember when Elvis died. I remember the news of John Lennon dying.

And then, there were people I knew. They started dying. High school classmates who died of terrible accidents or of cancer. Co-workers dying of heart attacks from work-related stress. My mother-in-law passing away in my home, and I continued with the CPR until the paramedics arrived. The two dogs that were ours and not my parents’ dogs, who each lived well into their second decade. One, we had put to sleep, the other we knew was coming. Neither was easy.

But, I’ve been lucky, too. I met famous people. I became friends with some of the authors I read while growing up. I managed to earn both a bachelors and a masters degree with no scholarships at all, and held the jobs to pay off the loans. I met a remarkable woman and married her. I have three young adult children who are wonderful people.

I’ve set foot on three continents, and flown across two oceans. I have driven from coast to coast between stints living on either coast. I’ve experienced cold so numbing that I stillhave effects from the frostbite on my fingers to this day, and I’ve stood outside in the desert when the mercury hit 118 Fahrenheit degrees.

I glommed onto science fiction as a youth, and watched it become so mainstream that those who ridiculed me as a schoolboy lamented the passing of the man who played the role ofscience fiction’s greatest hero, Mr. Spock.

So many things happen in a lifetime that a single blog post can’t possibly capture more than a sliver. Perhaps I’ll put more into a memoir one day, if the next fifty years lets me become somebody people want to know more about. If not, that’s okay, too.

One thing is for certain, it’s GREAT TO BE ALIVE!