Gettin’ Older

Getting older is a strange sensation. Most days I honestly forget that I’m staring down the barrel of forty years old, and of course there are those that will read that last sentence and laugh at my thinking nearing forty is “getting older”, but we’re each the oldest we’ve ever been and thirty-eight seems a lot older than the young man I often feel like I am.

I was interviewing someone for a job recently and when they wrote their birthday down a ton of bricks landed on my head when it hit me that when they were born I had already been working for my company for five years; nothing wakes you up to how old you are, like realizing your career is five years into adulthood.

Last weekend I took a boat trip down the Duck River with my cousins, our children, and my uncle and as we coached our kids through the proper methods of paddling the boat, so many strange memories came rushing back to me. Those same cousins and I had floated that same river with our Uncle Harold thirty years ago when we were our children’s age. It was the oldest I had ever felt; being the adult that was facilitating the exact activities I had done as a child. Had it been a movie, the opening credits would have been a video of me as a child on that river that slowly faded into the current day.

The strangest of all was how so many things had changed but so many things had stayed the same. I know that river like the back of my hand; the cave we used to eat lunch in was still there, as were the wooden stairs that lead up the bank to someone’s cabin. I guess nothing had really changed, except for the people. Uncle Harold’s gone, and the children we once were are too, but when we got back my son said he can’t wait until we do it again, so I guess in a small way those children live on.