This is 60
When you get there, 60 isn’t what you’d expected. It’s not your grandmother’s 60. Or the version you imagined when you were 10.
I thought by the time I reached this milestone I’d be wiser. That I would’ve learned from the mistakes I made when I was 30 or 40 or 50. That I’d be smart enough to think through steps and repercussions before taking a leap forward or check myself before rolling back. But here I am at 60 and I’m no further along than when I was 20, fumbling towards adulthood. I’m not comfortably settled, retired, looking back on a life well-lived; I’m starting over and each first step is awkward and uncertain.
I wanted to see how I marked each decade before this one. I’ve been keeping journals since I was a teenager. Surely I wrote about turning 30. Nope. The moment came and went. The night before my 30th birthday, I had dinner with 14 strangers I’d just met on the set of a public service announcement we filmed on top of Breckenridge Mountain in Colorado. The client was a car company and the story was about safe-driving in a snowstorm. It was mid-November and not especially snowy. The crew hauled a snow machine next to the car and sprayed fake snow against the windshield. We had a “wrap” party at a restaurant on the mountain and they got me a cake.
As I approached the next decade, I had a goal of running a marathon before I turned 40. The race would be a 40th birthday present to myself. I started training for it with a much younger running friend. We picked the Marine Corps Marathon in Washington, D.C. as our event – we’d missed the lottery selection for New York City and Marine Corps was our back-up. The race was October 28, 2001, 6 weeks after 9/11 and the Pentagon was still smoldering as we circled the building three times on the route before finishing at the Iwo Jimo Memorial in Arlington, VA. Technically, I was still 39 when I did my first marathon. That November 12, I celebrated my day at a dinner with a small group of friends in my home town. It made me think of “Sally” from When Harry Met Sally bemoaning, “…And I’m going to be 40.” “When?” her friend asks. “Someday…” she says. For me, someday was now.
Another decade passed and nearing 50, I was still driving the first car I’d owned, a 20-year-old, now-faded red Toyota Celica that needed more work to fix than it was worth. It fell apart in the summer. Mom bought me a car – an Atomic Blue Honda Civic. I loved that color. I’d had it just 5 days (it didn’t even have plates yet) and a hurricane was approaching New Jersey and the entire east coast. I parked the car inside the garage before the storm. We parked Mom’s one month-old Honda Accord in the driveway. In the middle of the night the storm uprooted a huge oak tree from the woods behind our house. It came down on the roof with a clap like thunder that woke us, landed directly on her car, flattening it and turning it into a convertible filled with acorns. It was totaled. My brand new car survived, despite sitting in the flooded garage. I wrote about the hurricane, “Irene,” but not my 50th birthday a few months later. I think Mom and I went to Panevino, our favorite Italian restaurant. I should have written about making it to a half-century. But I hadn’t written a word.
The Civic is now 10 years old and needs as much work as the Toyota. I can’t afford to fix it. The beautiful blue exterior is fading from the California sun. Mom is gone three and a half years already. I uprooted my life after she died, left New Jersey and moved to California. Each day feels like my past is erased and I am struggling to come to terms with living with loss. Mom was my memory for parts of my childhood, and a source for details of her past. There are gaps in those moments not chronicled in pictures or words.
What do I know so far? Only a bit. Another writer (a published one), Robert Fulghum, who wrote All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, put it well:
“Share everything.
Play fair.
Don’t hit people.
Put things back where you found them.
Clean up your own mess.
Don’t take things that aren’t yours.
Say you’re sorry when you hurt somebody.
Wash your hands before you eat.
Flush.
Warm cookies and cold milk are good for you.”
I’ve learned a few more things in 60 years (but not much more). So I can add :
“Don’t leave the cake out in the rain.
Knock three times on the ceiling, twice on the pipe.
There is no reason to struggle over word problems.
You will never need the Pythagorean theorem; but you can learn to spell hypotenuse, in case someone asks.
Don’t over train.
Don’t get injured.
Rest.
Edit your work.
Rewrite.
All that matters is being kind.
It doesn’t matter what other people think of you.
Verbally nod if you can’t say something nice.
Let others shine.
You’re not the smartest person in the room.
Surround yourself with people who make you laugh.
Eschew stupidity.
You can’t please everyone.
Eat ice cream if you want.
Do you.”
I wondered how I could mark the moment of turning 60 without letting it pass by. I gave myself a birthday card with a look-alike picture of my cat, Whisper, on the cover. I told myself, “you’ve made it this far, so you should probably stick around to see how it ends.” And, “you’re old, but you don’t have gray hair. So that’s something!” If I had money to spare, I’d donate to a cause. Maybe run an ultra marathon of 60 miles – just to say I could. But I’m too tired for that. I’ll settle for 6.5 miles on a cloudy, misty morning.
Or I could just write it down. Mark the milestone on paper (and send it out into the digital universe for all eternity) so I’d remember what I did the day I turned 60.
Not Whisper, but close