“40 Isn’t old if you’re a tree”

That was a shirt my dad got. I remember it, remember feeling how old he’d become, an oldness that would, from that point on, never leave him. Not having been raised by him, I’d like to know how he felt then, wearing that shirt.

I think you’re as wise as I, Dear Reader, in that you probably scoff at milestones. 30, 40, First Day of Summer. You scoff, don’t you?

But between us, as I ignore them with my rational brain, I also can’t help but rubber my neck as I pass a milestone on the road. Just a glance.

I’m 40 today. Also turning 40 this month are Raiders of the Lost Arc and Stripes.

I watched the former last night. It hasn’t aged. In fact, it looked a little too good. Whatever new TV I got at Costco last week has ironed out the wrinkles and the fuzz, and even John Rhys-Davies looks young and fit and ready to storm the mines of Morior (sp?).

But I know I’m not celluloid, that I can’t be digitally remastered. I am older. There are wrinkles; there is lost hair. Knee pain. There are older kids about.

I suppose an age milestone, like a round-number birthday, is as much an invention as actual milestones, or miles themselves. Age and distance did not exist before we put a name on them, and chose at which points to make a big deal.

100 miles isn’t particularly far; 40 isn’t particularly old. In 1850 the life expectancy of a US human was 40. So at 20 did they get you the tree tee-shirt?

A good friend from high school said something to me last summer, as we spent a weekend drinking. “I’m not any different. I’m the same.”

He meant he’s identical person, the same being, the same set of features that makes him him, as he was at 17. Don’t I agree? Yes, it’s the same conveyance that’s brought us to where we are this very second, as the carriage it was at the beginning.

I tell you, Dear Reader, this is another point in the road at which a role model, a map maker, a AAA route book, would be especially useful. Not because 40 means anything. It doesn’t, I swear, Reader. At 39 I could have used a marker, not simply to say, “You’ve come this far”, but more like a yard stick, to mix metaphors. An elder person who is farther down the road, to assess my travels thus far and gauge where I should be by this point, and where I should point the next 40.

But like a tree, who is never old, the only milestone is silence.