They say you’re only as old as you feel.
I thought about that as I was getting a haircut a couple of weeks ago. “Sure is a lot of white coming out in your hair,” my hairdresser remarked.
Yup. I feel old.
Can’t lay all the blame on the hairstylist, though. The fact that my 10-year-old now wears women’s size 7 shoes and my almost-12-year-old looks better in my clothes than I do goes right along with Geezerpalooza, here. Heck, the fact that I have an almost-12-year-old about does me in.
At the moment, said almost-12-year-old, her sister and two of their friends are having a “sleepover,” meaning an all-night Wii-and-movie rave, in the game room, and I’ve been this close to telling them to turn the music down.
If that’s not feeling old, I don’t know what is.
Yes, I do. There was a Facebook meme going around a few weeks ago about posting the song that was number one the day you were born. One of my coworkers posted Men at Work’s “Down Under.” And if you’re reading this and saying to yourself, “What’s wrong with that?” or, even worse, “Never heard of it,” I don’t want to know.
Bad enough that this year’s high school graduates were born in 1994. Nineteen-ninety-four. I was ENGAGED!!
Be happy about those gray hairs, the Facebook memes soothe; as they are a gift many aren’t privileged to be around long enough to see. Those lines around the eyes and mouth? Simply signs you’ve lived and laughed. Hate getting old? Beats the alternative.
Says you. I can be crabby about it if I want to. Comes with crone territory.
Slightly Older Princess spent this weekend with a head cold and a fever. I took out the battery-powered thermometer first, the one we’ve had since before her birth. It made a halfhearted squawk and blinked out. I realize it, too, is almost 12, but I can still see myself cruising the aisles of Babies R Us, gathering newborn-supply items like I planning to send my impending infant, Kal-El style, into the vacuum of space. I can remember using it for the first time on her, too, a screaming 9-month-old with glassy eyes, at two in the morning on a Sunday, and the utter panic when I realized it was registering 106. I remember how weak-kneed and thankful I was when the ER doctor pronounced it an ear infection and said she’d be fine.
Surely that was a year ago? Two, at most?
This aging stuff does have a tiny fringe benefit or two. When the digital thermometer croaked, I pulled out the old glass thermometer with the mercury inside. I’m old enough to know how to shake it down and read the silver line.
I know how to look up stuff in a dictionary, how to entertain myself without an iPhone and how to connect a VCR. I can cook dinner without a microwave, write a letter longhand – in cursive! – and tell time on a standard clock. I can even do my multiplication tables without a calculator, something I found was well nigh impossible for a group of high school sophomores I once knew.
So there are some advantages to being ancient. All you young’uns better keep we fuddy-duddies around. You’ll need us after the Apocalypse.
Until then, though, keep those sleepover kids off my lawn.
