Aging, Time and a Few Other Lite Tidbits

I apologize for the use of "lite," even sardonically, in my title. One of my few pet peeves, actually, is misspellings of this nature. The "word" "Xmas" makes me want to scream. But I wanted to use "lite" there; it felt right. Uh oh. I feel myself on the verge of annoying myself and quite possibly you in a painfully familiar circular talky kind of way. Let's get right to the writing, as it were.

In the weeks before I turned ten, I was filled with anxiety. I had decided that in becoming an age with double digits I would be, in some sense, leaving behind my childhood, I was in mourning in advance. I had decided that I loved nine, that it was--and would always be--my favorite age. I suspect this is a little strange; regardless, I was preoccupied with age, aging and the passing of time from very early on. I remember worrying that I would not be able to function when I was say, sixteen--the oldest age I could imagine if I really, really tried--because I would be so close to death that thoughts of my death would be all-consuming. I imagined myself totally paralyzed by my proximity to death pretty much twenty-four hours a day once I reached adulthood.

Aging is so colored by perspective. I am going to try right now to place myself at my tenth birthday, for argument's sake, and I can see myself sitting on the floor in the living room full of relatives. I am setting up a game just given to me by my great aunt Esther. It has lots of colored plastic pieces. It is not that Hungry Hippos game that still, for some reason, seems appealing to me in spite of myself, but it is something like it, a game that my mother--champion of wooden toys and handmade doll clothes--would never have given me. I remember feeling excited about it.

The relatives: how old were they, and how old did I think they were? When I was ten my parents would have been--oh my god--38. Just. Exactly the age that I am now. They seemed old to me--not old in a white-haired grandparent way, but so out of the realm of youth as to be no longer on a first name basis with it. My mother would have been preparing, serving or cleaning up food. My father would have been talking to people, socializing, perhaps clearing plates, although this may have been before his involuntary and only partial conversion to equal partner in all things household. I won't even start with the seemingly ancient white-haired grandparents and great aunts and uncles, who would have been younger than sixty, younger than my young-seeming parents are now.

There is no way, no conceivable way, that I can be the same age that my parents were at that tenth birthday party, the family party, where I escaped up to my room at one point to sit on the floor on the far side of my bed and cry, literally weep as I counted seconds in my head as what I thought were the best seconds of the best minutes of the best portion of my life were lost forever to all time. Ten. I somehow knew it wasn't for me.

Ten was fine. Not as good as nine, but I think that was a coincidence. Two things occur to me. Well, more than two, but the two big ones are: If I still feel like exactly the same person in my head as I did on the brink of ten, does that mean I will still feel like a ten-year-old when I am sixty-five? Is that a problem? And why does everyone else seem so comfortable in their grown-up skin? As a person who tends to idealize others I'd like to speculate that there are a lot of would-be ten-year-olds running around masquerading as grown-ups. Or maybe I'm just trying to make myself feel better.

Now, of course, that I am a parent myself more age and time questions raise themselves. Does Lily think I am as old--as other--as I did of my parents then? And at what age is the sense of one's self first formed? In other words, when does that moment occur when a person says to him or herself: Okay. This is me.

I actually do think I will cut this short to try to remember more about my parents at my age now. (This is code for: play online Scrabble. The ten-year-old me would have liked it too.)