Uphill both ways, in the snow...

Do you ever look at your parents and think, You’re SO OLD. Except you’re not. Except you are. I’M REALLY CONFUSED RIGHT NOW!

I feel like I do this a lot. My parents were slightly older than average baby-having age for the time when I came along--my mother was 34 and my dad was 40. They were obviously always senior to the majority of my peers’ parents which made them feel extra old to me growing up. Now, though, I look at them and their peers and think, You know, you two don’t look as old as you are next to everyone else.

Case in point, my father was in a fraternity during his college years. There is a span of years from which the members have kept in touch and, what’s more, continued to get together regularly. I would guess that the core of this group are between their mid-sixties and mid-seventies, but there are some outliers down into their fifties and upwards of eighty who still show up from time to time. At this point, the annual stag weekend consists of a bunch of old codgers drinking far too much Scotch and wreaking havoc on golf courses and, let’s be honest, that’s a pretty hilarious mental image. But in my head, my dad isn’t as old as the rest of them.

Except he is.

It’s really weird!

I think it must have something to do with proximity, for lack of a better term. I know my parents. To a greater or lesser degree, I have a handle on the current state of their health. (I mean, there was that one time when my dad had an angiogram and they put in a couple [more] stents, and nobody bothered to tell me for three weeks and then I got it secondhand from my aunt, but never mind.) I know what their daily life looks like. I see them regularly enough not to notice any gradual changes to their appearance. And, in the grand tradition of getting to hear all about everyone’s aches and pains and life-threatening diseases, or the ‘Doom & Gloom Report’ as it’s affectionately known in my family, there thankfully isn’t really much to know about ongoing medical hooplah. On the other hand, when I get secondhand gossip about someone’s hip replacement or how one of ‘the boys’ is now completely dementia-riddled, or that another guy died, all I can think is Wow. You sure know a lot of old people. And you should. You’re an old person. Except you can’t be, because you have both your hips, most of your wits, and, well, your life. It’s a strange phenomenon, and I doubt I’m the only person who experiences it. I suppose to a different degree I experienced it with my grandparents as well. Obviously they were always really old as far as I was concerned, but they never seemed to be the same kind of old as other people I encountered of the same age. There’s another facet to this as well, which has just occurred to me. My mother and the older of my two aunts are approximately four months different in age, my mother being the older of the two. I have always perceived my mother (Sorry, Mom!) as being drastically older than my aunt, even though in the grand scheme of things four months is hardly a difference. I also don’t perceive any of my aunts or uncles to be the ages they are by comparison to the world at large.

It must stem from familial proximity, I suppose. I can’t seem to rationalize it any other way. Then again, it could just be plain old familiarity. I haven’t noticed the passage of time the same way with my closest friends whom I’ve known for ages as I have with, say, the people who showed up to our tenth high school reunion ::COUGH:: years ago. (That was kind of hilarious, actually. All the boys we all thought were hot shit in high school showed up fat and bald. Who’d-a thunk it?) Obviously none of us are three- or eight- or just-born-years-old anymore, but somehow the changes didn’t feel that drastic, and now we’re adults, and still find ourselves occasionally looking for an ‘adultier adult’.

I wonder what it looks like to other people. What do *I* look like to other people in relation to my actual age? I’ll bet it’s different to my family than it is to my friends than it is to someone I have a chat with in the line at the grocery store. How old do I look to a four-year-old? I bet I look ancient!

It’s different from the inside, too. Sometimes I feel pretty damned old. Sometimes I feel like I hit age ten and my body kept going but nothing else about me did.

The passage of time is a strange beast.

Now, get off my lawn!