On my birthday a year ago, I wrote about the noise of construction equipment demolishing the homes across the street to make way for a road expansion project. Now that project is nearly completed, and the workmen and their machines have moved on down the way, and I’ve been enjoying a few weeks of relative peace and quiet before traffic is unleashed onto the newly added lanes in front of my house. Meanwhile, here on the eve of this year’s birthday, my main sensory impression isn’t auditory, but olfactory: The air is thick with smoke from a wildfire burning out of control in the next county south of mine.
As I did last year, I’ve been straining to find some metaphor in all these impressions and coming up with nothing. If there is any meaning to be found in sparkling new concrete and hazy air, I’m not sharp enough to find it. And maybe that’s my metaphor right there, the encapsulation of exactly what it feels like to be only one planetary orbit away from the half-century mark. I’m just not quite sharp enough. Not anymore.
I can feel you rolling your eyes and muttering, “Oh boy, here he goes,” but it’s okay. I’m really not depressed about my birthday this year, at least not to the extent I have been in previous years. And I’m not feeling particularly old either, at least — again — not as much as I have in years past. But I have become keenly aware in the past twelve months of how very young many of the people around me are, if that makes sense, and also just how much the world no longer seems to be geared toward me and my preferences and priorities. I keep thinking of that scene in The Last Jedi where Yoda tries to get it through Luke’s thick head (and those of a significant percentage of Gen-X Star Wars fans) that the story is no longer centered on him. It’s about those new characters, now, and the best Luke can do is help them in their own hero’s journey. “We are what they grow beyond,” he says with that impish chuckle in his Muppety voice.
Or something. I don’t know, maybe it’s just the late hour and the scotch talking. As I said, I am surprisingly un-depressed this year. But damn, I can’t help feeling like summer is winding down before I even really noticed it had arrived, you know?
