Comments by Scoper...

My God, I'm Middle Aged!

I woke up this morning and I was middle-aged. How did I know? Not by the calendar: it shows I'm barely 41. No, it's not that. 

Sure, age is a "state of mind". So, on a mind-trip across America, I guess I'd be somewhere in the "state" of Nebraska now. But that's not what I woke up thinking about. 

I thought about my older brother. He's 50 now, and has been my lifelong benchmark for "old." You can't be old if you're younger than Mike. Forget dear old Dad's reminiscences about "when I was your age." When Mike was a little boy, he'd step outside at night to watch Sputnik pass overhead, like a star that moved, blinking on and off, on and off. The Soviet satellite did nothing but beep, and in those pre-Internet days, you couldn't even hear that. 

Then I thought about myself in 1969, a decade of age under my belt, glued to the tube with a billion and a half other people worldwide, watching the shadowy images of men named Neil and Buzz walking on another world. Those were heady, wonderful days, almost enough to make you forget how close your only brother came to getting his butt shot off in Vietnam. 

Having held on to his butt, Mike is oddly philosophical for a man who doesn't smoke a pipe and who has no elbow-patches on his coat. He got to middle-age first.

"What tipped you off?" I asked.

"When I could take my present age, double it and not reasonably expect to live that long."

That made sense. As I lay in bed, these things also made sense:

• Much of the music you loved in high school is now in the public domain.

• You're no longer embarrassed to display a cart-full of "Lean Cuisine" frozen dinners at the supermarket.

• You drew the privacy curtain extra-tight behind you last election, then voted (mostly) Republican.

• Like Republican Alan Keyes, you're technically old enough to run for president, but unlike Republican Alan Keyes, you've never had the desire to dive into a mosh pit.

• While reading Tom Brokaw's "The Greatest Generation," you realized you grew up around the very people he was talking about.

• As he gets deader and deader, Frank Sinatra is sounding better and better.

• (Corollary to the above:) you take your vacation in Atlantic City, because Las Vegas isn't the "Rat Pack's" Vegas anymore.

• Twice this month, you knew the answer to "Final Jeopardy," yet when you had computer problems, you sought out the youngest person you could find to help you. 

• You realize that computers and the Internet are really what separate the "boomers" from the "x-ers," because you were all raised by the same damn television. (This doesn't explain, though, why you think "The Brady Bunch" was funny and "Full House" was not. Or why you think "Mr. Wizard" is intellectually superior to "Bill Nye the Science Guy.")

• You watched "The Muppet Show," but not "Sesame Street," because you already knew your letters and numbers. 

• You watched Roger Moore in the role, but you always knew that Sean Connery was the "real" James Bond.

• After 3 years of fiddling with it, your VCR finally displays the correct time.

• On a summer road trip, the sign that read: "Gas-Food-Lodging" took on a new meaning. 

• You think "cool" and "awesome" are nauseatingly overused, yet you don't feel the same way about "groovy."

• You've recently been having fleeting thoughts on the order of: "Y'know, Dad may have actually been right about this/that/them/the outcome. 

• Most frightening of all: You can stay up as late as you want to, and you don't want to.

Hey, we know!
.

 
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