Generally, I haven’t been too fazed by birthdays ending with a zero. 30, 40, even 50 didn’t feel that different from other years. But there’s something equal parts weird and mundane about turning 60.
Weird: at 50, I could fool myself into thinking that I might be right around a half-way point. If I started taking better care of myself (which, of course, I didn’t do a whole lot of), I might make it to 100. People do, nowadays! But 60? Much more obviously closer to the finish line than the starting line. And that feels a bit strange.
Mundane: The years, especially since the pandemic began, seem to be more or less just plodding along. Not a whole lot changes.
Of course, there are many ways in which that’s a good thing. For many people, much has changed, often for the worse, over the last eighteen months. Plodding along is better than a lot of alternatives, for sure.
But I’ve also reflected a bit on how I’ve changed over the years — not just the post-50 decade, but longer term. I remember when I identified myself as any number of things that, for the most part, I’ve simply let slip away.
I used to think of myself as a reader. I read a lot, and widely, from High Lit to pulp. I embraced classics and comics, philosophy, history, memoir. I read novels, plays, short stories, essays. I identified so deeply as a reader that, when I returned to school, I ended up an English major and, eventually, an English teacher.
I used to think of myself as a musician. I played guitar. I sang and wrote songs. I recorded a bit on my own, with cheap equipment and a sort of debilitating perfectionism, and in a couple actual studios with my band, The Reign. And even if I never advanced beyond a middling-intermediate level on the guitar, I had some shining moments, and I wrote some songs that I still like.
I used to think of myself as an intellectual, too — though, looking back, this is probably one of my sillier identities. But I hung out with smart people. Lots of my friends at the time were musicians, painters, and writers, and we had lots of late-night conversations about genuinely deep things, maybe even important things.
I’m not sure what I identify myself as now. There are a couple roles that I fill, more or less successfully. I’m a father of two teenagers, though I wouldn’t claim to be a good one (perhaps a symptom, in part, of their age), and I’m a community college professor, which is important work but doesn’t leave much time or energy for reading (which is why I became an English major in the first place).
Mostly, I’m just distracted — or, more accurately, I distract myself. Since last March, YouTube has taught me more about guitar, recording, mixing, videography, lighting, sound, and so on than I learned perhaps in my whole life up to this point. But it’s also designed by really clever people to draw me down the endless rabbit hole, and I fall for it.
And there’s a certain… malaise, I guess, that comes from remaining in a pandemic that we should be well past, were it not for a cynical death cult that has infiltrated an entire political party.
But I’ve been clawing my way back lately. I’m carving out time to read most evenings — not the hours on end that I used to manage, but even a few minutes at a time creates a kind of spark. I’ve been playing my guitars a bit, too — I even ordered a new one, kind of as a birthday present (though thanks to supply chain challenges, it remains on back order). I’ve started recording again, too; I finished a song, just to learn some of the new-fangled equipment, and I’ve got a few in various stages of construction. No new songs, yet, but hints of ideas are starting to pop up during my morning walks.
Let’s see if 60 is just weird enough to get me moving in the directions that I at least say that I want to go.
Photo of “Manufactured by” plaque by Deleece Cook on Unsplash
Photo of Alice in Wonderland caterpillar by JOSHUA COLEMAN on Unsplash