I believe our perception of age and time changes with each passing year we live on this earth. My first awareness of this came one Christmas when I was a small child. Back then, it seemed that Christmas night was in some way the saddest time of the year, because it meant Christmas morning was a year away. At that age a year seemed like forever.
I said something to my grandmother about how I wished we could make the year go by quickly so it could be Christmas morning again, to which she admonished me, telling me to never wish time away because it goes much quicker than I realized. Boy, was she right. Of course, I didn’t understand that then.
In my teens, I assumed my parents—and most people of their age, were relatively clueless about the world we lived in. This was in the late sixties and early seventies. My parents were in their late thirties and early forties during that time.
At eighteen I had lived a lifetime—at least my lifetime at that moment in history. Looking ahead, it meant it would take another eighteen years to reach the age of thirty-six and considering how long it had taken me to reach eighteen, and how long those four years of high school were, I had so much time. Time was something I could take for granted.
When I was in my mid-twenties my father’s upcoming fiftieth birthday terrified me, because I worried it would be his last. My maternal grandfather and my mother’s youngest brother had both died around their fiftieth birthday and I was convinced that when a man reached that aged—especially one who smoked—his end was near.
(While Dad did live another thirteen years, I realize now he died too young, but considering his smoking, poor food choices, over working, and under exercising, it wasn’t surprising, yet another topic altogether.)
In my thirties was the first time I truly felt like an adult, who people took seriously—despite being both a mother and wife since my twenties. But then in my forties, I felt something I had never felt before. Old. It’s not that I felt physically old. I simply felt I had passed over some divide between youth and old age. My time was running out, and that time was moving much faster than it had when I was younger.
When I looked back on my life, I realized my first twenty years of life had gone relatively slower than my last twenty—with each new year moving faster and faster.
But then in my fifties, my husband and I took an unexpected houseboat trip. At the time we were real estate agents for a brokerage in Lake Havasu City, Arizona. One of the agents in our office—someone whom we didn’t know that well at the time—invited my husband and me to join him and his wife (another real estate agent at our office) for their annual Lake Powel houseboat trip. They went every summer with a group of friends, and they had room for one more couple.
My husband, who had always wanted to go on a houseboat trip said yes without asking me. When he told me, I thought he had gone nuts. Go on vacation with a bunch of strangers?
But we ended up going, and it proved to be one of our best vacations.
So how does this have anything to do with my perception of age or the passage of time? During the first houseboat trip, I learned that three of the four couples with us were much older than my husband and myself. In fact, some were either nearing their 70th birthday or were already in their 70s.
But these weren’t old people. They were fun, adventurous, and intelligent. They liked to waterski, ride wave runners, and knew how to captain a houseboat. It was a wonderful trip, and the next year, we joined them for another houseboat trip. Unfortunately, the one who had originally invited us on the trip had been battling melanoma for some time and the disease had finally caught up with him. So the third summer we had a mock house boat trip and stayed in Havasu for our sick friend.
And so, I went from thinking I was old in my forties, to looking back on that time and laughing at my youthful foolishness. The cliché is spot on—age is just a number.
In less than two weeks I turn sixty-nine. I’m still younger than some of those dear friends were on those houseboat trips. At least three of them have since passed—but that’s part of life, something that no longer scares me as it did when I was forty.
And that first houseboat trip—it was over 18 years ago. But if feels like it was maybe ten years ago at most.
