Most days I don’t really feel all that old, and I guess compared to Jimmy Carter and Methuselah I could be considered a spring chicken, but every once in a while I can’t help but reckon with my age. I never really even had moments of feeling old until I turned thirty-seven, for whatever reason, but in the last ten months it seems as though I have been bombarded with constant reminders.  

Chief among those reminders was a concert my wife and I went to, at which a band from our teenage years played a twenty year old album in its entirety. The entire time I was thinking, “There’s no way I’m old enough for this to be happening.” Just to be sure I did the math and I am in fact old enough.  

That’s not to say that getting older is necessarily a bad thing, it’s just something I’d never really considered doing.  

Mostly what makes me feel old is less the way I feel and more the way the world around me has changed. Thinking on the twenty years since that band’s album was released, I couldn’t help but notice that we might as well be on a different planet than the one on which we lived in 2003.  

If you had told me then that I’d carry a computer around in my pocket, I would have laughed in your face. If you’d told me Alabama would find their next Bear Bryant I would have sought church discipline for your lying. Had you shown me a crystal ball through which I could see my wife and kids I would have said, “Nah. There’s no way I’ll be that blessed.”  

Twenty years ago I wouldn’t have dreamed I wouldn’t go on to argue politics on TV or that there would come a day when they didn’t play George Strait on the radio. But this is the world I live in now, a relatively politics and George Strait free place that I did not have a category for twenty years ago.  

By the way, is it supposed to rain? My knee sure is bothering me.