Preview of my column this week on age and time and my inability to keep track of either. ----------- By Adam W. Leech For something so simple, aging is a difficult concept to grasp. I’m going to be 34 this year. On its surface, my life had progressed according to a general societal script – college, job, marriage, child, mortgage, another child, different job, etc. Yet, as I get older, the more distorted my sense of time has become. Some memories from long ago seem like they were yesterday. Meanwhile, events from less than a year ago seem like a different lifetime. Children are the ultimate measuring stick. In their early years, everything that happens to them is considered within the context of their age. For at least two years, you’re obligated to state their age in monthly increments rather than years (otherwise, we’ll never know how to compare their development to our own children). From fine motor skills, to the intake of medicine, to the consistency of the food they consume and the size of diaper that catches it on the way out, everything is measured in months. Even their clothes are measured in three-month increments for, like, two years. Gradually, the measurement extends from three months to six month as children become more conscious of their birthdays and start to measure their age in halves. Around high school, years become particularly important as social status is greatly impacted by grade level. Each year represents a critical step up the social ladder. At some point after that, the importance of age starts to wane drastically. After 21, you start to lose track of exactly what age you are – not just because you’re drunk all the time. It just doesn’t matter anymore. Then you enter the “real world” and realize there are 24-year-old high school dropouts controlling Fortune 500 companies and 50-year-olds who are college freshman. If my chosen profession was NFL running back, my career would already be over. Maybe it’s the lack of age-based achievement that starts to skew your perception of time. But that number that was once such a crucial source of your identity becomes basically meaningless and the accuracy by which you sense time disappears. For example, where there should be a detailed recollection of that crucial time in which I came of age – after graduating college and before meeting my future wife – is merely a stretch of nonsequential, random memories, the consequences for which seem rather nebulous. The activities that filled my free time prior to becoming a father are a distant memory. Yet, the memory of me nervously wiping up amniotic fluid as I tried to attentively fill my time in anticipation of my first son’s arrival is vivid and fresh. Then, that baby I was bottle feeding just the other day holds his foot up to my wife’s to reveal his foot is the same size as hers. It is then that I become keenly aware that I’m approaching a decade at this parenting thing. Now that one of my stepdaughters is married and the other is engaged, it is highly likely I will be a grandfather before the age of 40. And, since more than half of my siblings have yet to reproduce, there will be a day in the not-too-distant future that my father and I will be rocking our grandbabies at the same time. That said, when I stop and consider my expectations of people, outlook on spirituality, various compulsions and interests, they are largely the same as they were 10 years ago. I don’t even know what the signs of aging are anymore. I pulled something in my back last week tying my shoe. It left me partially incapacitated for days and desperate need of a chiropractor. I spent days walking with one hand on my back, the other stabilizing myself on nearby furniture. I might as well have been 90 years old. Then I spent a Saturday morning playing Legos. It started with my sons, but ultimately ended with me playing by myself for almost two hours. Later that day, I was jumping up and down and dancing like a lunatic after the Patriots score a touchdown. Aaaaand, now I’m 10 years old. There are examples of age defiance everywhere. So how is it that age can mean so much, yet nothing at all? Adam W. Leech lives with his wife Barbara and two young sons in Southern Maine. He can be reached at awleech@yahoo.
Posted on: Thu, 22 Jan 2015 23:59:06 +0000
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