age ain’t nothin’ but a number…kinda

life really is cyclical…

…and it’s become glaringly obvious to me as of late.

we all have our favorite vintage. mine appears to be 1977. i was engaged three and a half times (it only counts as half when it’s a stripper, i’ve always said) and two and half of them (including the stripper AND the one that ended in marriage) were girls born in 1977.

(i’ll quickly add all of the 1977 ones i’m still on super good terms with, unlike the 1974 edition)

doing the math, the ufc and i are six and a quarter years apart, give or take a day or two. at the age we met, whereby i was forty one-and she was thirty-five, six years and some change isn’t a big deal. at the time you’re reading this, with my birthday already passed and hers not, i’m fifty-two and she’s forty-five. again, not a big deal.

but if we’d met the summer after i graduated high school (1989) whereby i woulda been eighteen and she would have been twelve, that’s a VERY big deal. a felonious deal. but we were two time zones away, and that didn’t happen back then.

and that’s okay.

earlier in life the age delta woulda been a huge thing. at this stage, and many stages before and after, it’s also not a big deal.

but fast forward a bit…

there’s a good friend of the family i help out on a weekly basis. her husband and son have both passed, and so i pop by and do everything from help her scan telegrams from world war ii to put the bottle on the ozarka machine. i let her pay me twenty bucks so she doesn’t feel like she’s getting charity, and all is good. she went to school with my dad (coincidentally) and was born in 1944. my uncle (the only living member of the generation before me that’s a blood relative) was born in 1937. while the friend of the family travels extensively, is very active, and walks around the state park near her house for fun, my uncle requires two canes to move, took an hour and some change to get in his new truck from the finance office, and required firemen to get into his house recently, because he couldn’t walk up the three stairs to his own front door.

that’s the difference six years and some change made on the OTHER end of the spectrum.

so, as kids we were breaking the law. on the senior end, we’re almost the difference from hospitable life to hospice care. but in the middle, where i’m at, it’s no big deal.

ah, the circle of life…