The Last Birthday

There are three significant birthdays in everyone’s life. I won’t count our first one, which is a big deal to our parents. But none of us can remember it, so we can’t have any reaction. The first life changing one, of course, is our eighteenth. We are legally considered adults. We can vote. Most of us have our driver’s license by then. We are just finishing high school. Many of us are going off to college. When I turned eighteen, the legal drinking age was still eighteen. I was a freshman in college. So that was a real bonus. The second significant birthday comes only three years later. Yes, twenty-one. You can drink. You can gamble. You become a real part of adult society. You can go to anyplace that says you must be twenty-one or older to be admitted, or eligible to win a big prize. So two of the three big ones come when we are just fully maturing, at least, we should be. Our whole life is ahead of us. Marriage, relationships, children, career, mortgages, paying off the college loan money you spent between those first two big birthdays, success, failure, and, we all hope, some degree of happiness and satisfaction.

We have to wait forty-four years for that third and final significant birthday. Some will argue that turning thirty, or forty, or fifty are also a big important milestone birthdays. But whenever you see categories broken down by age, the only one that doesn’t have an end age is sixty-five. It’s always “over 65” or “65+”. There is no next level. You are now on your own. We hope you have a long, happy, rest of your life, but we can’t put a number on it. There are many benefits to turning sixty-five. Many of us can retire. Although that can bring its own kind of stress. We qualify for Medicare. We qualify for Social Security. We get Senior Citizen rates at the movies, for car rentals, golf courses, and transit fares. Some places start treating you like a Senior Citizen at sixty-two. AARP starts recruiting you at fifty. All those frightening television drug ads, with the long list of horrible side effects are aimed at us.

Turning sixty-five is a time to look back, but also a time to look ahead. I consider myself very fortunate. I’ve been married for over forty of those years to Maureen. We have loved each through the good times and the bad. She supported me through a demanding career in TV news, while she worked as a pediatric nurse and we raised two boys. They became successful men who married two great women, and given us four beautiful grand daughters. This is an age when we can measure the good we’ve done by what positive impact we have had on others. We can also look back on the mistakes and bad decisions we all make. We don’t get do overs, but we should learn something about ourselves.

I do wonder how I got here so fast. Your parents and grandparents are sixty-five, not you. You think you’ll never get there. The world may seem to move slowly in the moment. But those moments, added together, move by in a flash. Just think how much faster the world moves now than it did sixty-five years ago. Many say age is relative. You’re as old as you feel. I can remember always being the youngest person in the room during my career. Later on, I was the oldest person in the room in a profession dominated by young people. I would wonder how they saw me. Was I the old guy who they had to listen to and tolerate? I admit looking at people in my new age bracket, and thinking, do I look that old? Maureen and I will go to an early movie or dinner, and I would say it’s all old people here. I always think we don’t look or act as they do.

Charles Dickens said this about growing older, “Father Time is not always a hard parent, and, though he tarries no one of his children, often lays his hand lightly upon those who have used him well; making them old men and women inexorably enough, but leaving their hearts and spirits young and in full vigor. With such people the grey head is but the impression of the old fellow’s hand in giving them his blessing, and every wrinkle but a notch in the quiet calendar of a well-spent life.” Feelings we all hope we can all have as we celebrate that last birthday.