1) Wrap Me in Quilts and Stuff Me With Waffles, Fifty is Coming Straight at Me Like a Train off the Tracks
On Friday we drove through blinding rain to Vermont, because that’s where I wanted to be when the pages of the calendar flipped past my last day in forty-nine-ville. I wanted down comforters, frilly B&B’s with big eggy breakfasts, maple sugar mooses, kind waitresses who would tell me I looked thirty-five, Queen Anne Victorians, farm houses with their rotting barns. I wanted someplace with a sense of history.
Because, like it or not, that’s what you get when you reach the five decade mark: a sense of history.
But I was determined to enter the black hole of fifty with some love, some comfort. I wanted to be coddled and tucked in like a newborn in fresh cotton, yet somehow party my brains out at the same time. Pouting that I could not have both, I stared out the window at the speed limit signs as they came flashing past: 50, 50, 50, YOU’RE FIFTY YEARS OLD, the signs shrieked, AND WHAT HAVE YOU DONE WITH YOUR LIFE?
I held my 61-year-old husband’s hand. It was possible. I could do this. He did it, and look at him! He breezed through sixty with uncanny grace. But even he knows better than to talk me at certain times. He gave me the gift of silence on the way to Woodstock so I could stare out the window like a mental patient.
As the mountains rose up around us, draped in eerie swaths of fog, I thought: you can hide behind thirty, forty, even forty-five, but NOT FIFTY. Fifty asks: do you have any centenarians in your family? If not, or even if you have, you’ve more than likely blown through way more than half your life. Fifty says: sorry, little missy, no more hiding in girlishness, no more boho waif in slouchy jeans. No more possibility of making the headline: “Dewy Ingenue Youngest Ever to Win National Book Award!”
2) We Stop for Gas and Neither of the Cute Guys at the Station Check Me Out
