Thirty Three

The irony of turning 30 was that so much was new: I'd gotten married the preceding March, I was a month into my new job, and was still learning the ins and outs of our apartment near the downtown portion of Sioux Falls. Three years later and much seems old hat: marriage life has founds its steady rhythm, Sioux Falls poses less of a mystery and work, despite another change in company, is much the same as its always been.  In that sense the day is more of a formality except for the fact that this will be my last birthday without children. 

I've read two books about old men in the last year or so and ended both despising the would be protagonists. Jonathan Raban's Foreign Land and Philip Roth's Everyman were books I would have wanted to like; books that might tell me a little about my future should I live a long life. Instead, ironically, they both wound up as good Christian books to me*: morality tales on how choices have consequences and human relationships are what persist in value when death looms close enough to eliminate all of life's normal pretensions. The two old men suffered from a narcissism I recognize in our high school selves - such self obsession that all conversation turns inward and we stop to really "see" the people around us because we're so busy making everything an aspect of that big old number one: ourselves. This thought really crystallized over the weekend when an old friend from my school days in Nairobi stopped by on a cross country trip with his family. Not only did we recollect different things, I felt a sense of us really seeing each other despite all that time we'd spent doing the equivalent of "shooting hoops" through those teen years. Jed the father, I hardly recognized you -

Well, here's to being 33, and here's to the hope that I keep seeing even when I'm old. Here's to human relationships, the preservation of marriage and the hope of longer life.

*I'm sure both authors would be quite unhappy with this opinion.