Kelly called her friend Elaine the other night and said, "Want to feel old? Thing One has a date!"

I don't know what Elaine said in response, but since she's younger than Kelly, who's younger than I am, this particular milestone is presumably supposed to make me feel decrepit indeed. Thing One is our elder son, a sixth grader who on Friday attended his first school dance and met a date there. I do think there's something about this that seems fretworthy, but the fret has more to do with the onset of adolescence in him than the onset of old age in me.

I don't know that I'm going to age gracefully, but I'm sure as hell doing it openly. I will not be denying my age, dyeing my hair, trying to retain the hair that's falling out, or doing anything else to hide my many years. My beard is already thoroughly shot with grey, and my temples are heading that way. (My dad's hair didn't go grey until well after he hit fifty, and my mom is still an emphatic brunette, so I may not go a long way down that road just yet, admittedly.) If nothing else, I'm hoping that my advancing age will clear up my skin; I'm so tired of having acne. Wrinkles would at least be a change from zits.

But here's the straight dope: I will be forty years old on March 1st, 2003. There is not one damn thing I can do to prevent this other than dying beforehand. And frankly, that's a step I'd prefer not to take.

I've already informed Kelly that there will be no cute black gifts or black decorations or black icing on this year's birthday cake. This is no time to be mourning the approach of death--it's been right here all along. This is a time to celebrate the fact that I've dodged it for four decades.

I've worked hard on reaching forty. There were plenty of times when I could have quit. I could have given up in high school, especially on that night when I was riding in Alex Zaffron's Dodge 442, barreling down Lakeshore Drive at some hideous multiple of the speed limit, with Quadrophenia blaring and the tailpipe dragging behind us, kicking up a tail of sparks that Halley would have admired. I could have burnt out my brain in the hundred-and-five-degree fever that the Cocksackie virus inflicted on me after a Cold Chisel show in 1983. I could have come up short of forty when my own car, a pale green Plymouth Horizon with a death wish and a vicious streak a mile wide, burned to the ground in 1986. I could have drowned in riptides, been fried by bad wiring, been overcome by fumes, taken a bullet from a psycho, or been laid low by disease.

But I didn't! I'm still here! Let's party!
8:25 PM

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LBJs

*As you can tell by the dates of these last two entries, the fall at WFS gets busier as exams draw near. Tomorrow is Review Day and I give my first exams Friday afternoon. Maybe then I'll have a chance to keep up with my journal in a more timely fashion.

*Parental Trauma #461 in an ongoing series: putting your child in a tepid bath because he's running a fever. It's especially upsetting to be doing it in the middle of the night, because he's been in a warm and cozy bed, sleeping, and here you come to yank him out of it and drop him in the tub. Worse, because he's feverish, he's shivering even at room temperature, and he's of course utterly miserable when you demand that he lie down in the water to help cool off his system. It's very hard to look at your naked, shivering offspring and force him to feel awful.

*Kelly and I have been hitting the weights. After a full year, we finally got ourselves oriented to the WFS fitness center and have been doing a basic workout twice a week. It's certainly helping me feel better, though I do have periodic bouts of extreme achiness after I've increased the weight I'm lifting. The treadmills and exercise bikes have also been welcome in recent weeks, because we've had the longest period of sustained precipitation that I can remember in a good long while. We're still catching up on the drought, mind you, but we're good and wet now.

*I missed the Leonid meteor shower this morning, but since it's an annual event, I can live with that. I saw it last year from the balcony of a friend's place in Virginia Beach, and it was stunning--a streak of light from out of the east every other second. Once dawn came up, we went to Back Bay NWR and birded for about seven hours, too--I saw my first Pintails, my first American Bittern (in one of the most poorly-lit sightings on my life list), and my first Northern Gannets on this side of the Atlantic. All in all, a good day.

*I'm done with the last (?) round of edits on the book. It's now tighter, more precise, and a wee bit shorter than it was. On the plus side, the stuff I cut may end up being used as a radio essay.

*Kelly's writing a novel this month. She decided to do this as part of the NaNoRiMo (National Novel Writing Month) movement--50,000 words in thirty days is the agreement that participants make. I have no idea what it's about--I've been carefully avoiding asking about it--or whether she's been able to keep up with her daily word goals, what with the feverish kids, workouts, etc. She's got a good attitude about it, I think; first write the thing, THEN worry about whether it's any good. At the end of the month, you'll still have written a novel. That'll make the next one easier, and presumably better. Am I participating? Hey, I'm lucky to have written the college recommendations I promised my students... and my contribution to an upcoming collection of essays on basketball... and my column for The Readerville Journal.

*Speaking of TRJ, I should note something in big letters:

KELLY WINS.

We met in a writing class, so we've both long harbored dreams of being writers, but there's always been a bit of friendly competition in that area. Up until now, I've been the first to cross each of the various literary rubicons we've encountered--I had the first rejection slip, the first professional publication (a review in The Comics Journal panning DC's execrable Wild Dog), the first solicitation (for another review in TCJ), and the first book sale. But even if she seizes up completely and I finish a novel before she does--damned unlikely at this point in the month--she wins: she's still the first to get a piece of fiction published. It's a story called "The Whispering Dictionary," and it appears in the second issue of The Readerville Journal. And it's mighty fine. Get a copy and read it.
4:07 PM

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