becoming middle-aged

When I wasn’t looking, I became middle-aged. I first noticed I was middle-aged in a picture taken of my backside as my granddaughter toddled beside me in her new Sunday dress. I recognized those legs and the hang of the skirt: They were my grandmother’s.
I brushed it off and determined to never wear those shoes and that skirt again. They were definitely not me. I was not a middle-aged grandmother.
The next time I noticed I was middle aged was at the reunion with my brother and sisters. Something about the five of us, walking across the parking lot reminded me of a summer day long ago.
On that summer day I had gone with my mother to a small family reunion with her aunts and uncles. I did not walk with my mother from the car to the church. Like any teenager I walked behind her as she plodded up the hill to the little country church with its crumbling cemetery.
At the reunion with my brothers ad sisters, we were not plodding up a hill to a late afternoon reunion.
We were climbing out of cars and walking across a flat parking lot to a family restaurant, but I still noticed we had all slowed down from 30 years ago.
Of course we weren’t as slow as those people at my mother’s reunion but none of us were teenyboppers anymore, either.
The reality of my years hit me again last week when I had to pose for a picture at the News-Times.
I did not look like a teenager. I looked middle-aged. The photographer did not understand my protest that the picture did not do me justice.
How could it? In that picture I looked like more like the older folks at that reunion than myself as a teenager.
Although that still startles me it shouldn’t be such a surprise. As a 10-year-old I realized that by the time the year 2000 came around I would be nearly as old as my youngest grandmother.
I was 10 in the early 60s. As a child my primary concern with 2000 A.D. was, “How old will my brothers and sisters and I be when all the numbers on the calendar roll over?”
With four of the five of us officially becoming a year older within a couple o weeks of the New Year each calendar change means we all are a year older. At 10 I was fascinated with the incomprehensible fact that we would all be in our 40s: 49, 48, 47, 45 and halfway to 44 when the calendar rolled over to 2000. Looking at 2000 A.D. from the perspective of the 60s, that seemed an impossibility. My mother was 30 and my father 31. How could I ever become 48 when my parents weren’t even that old?
The years have passed and as I write this, the year 2000 is a mere 67 days away. My 48th birthday follows shortly after. From the perspective of 1999 that doesn’t sound so old anymore.
I still feel like that teenager following Mom up the hill to the reunion. However, my pictures say my feelings lie. I don’t like that. But, considering my only other option, I’ll take being almost 48 as the year 2000 finally arrives.


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