Published December 17, 2004
The other morning I heard an ancient Gordon Lightfoot song on the radio.
"I'm on my second cup of coffee," sang that great '70s troubadour, "and I still can't face the day."
The song stopped me colder than yesterday's java. What? A second cup of coffee? When Lightfoot wrote that line, he was obviously a young man. Who past the age of 40 can metabolize two cups of caffeine before noon?
The song set me to thinking about how age whittles away at our habits and routines, at our tolerances and desires, the good as well as the bad. Little by little, you realize that just as there are things you may never get around to doing at all--writing that screenplay, learning Arabic, snowboarding--there are things you used to do but will probably never do again.
For example:
You'll never again drink a second cup of morning coffee. That first one leaves you twitchier than a live wire in a bathtub. A second one would shoot you to the moon and back and land you with a splat.
You will again drink a second glass of wine. But you know it's riskier than snowboarding. And you won't drink the second one nearly as reliably as you did before. The tax on the pleasure--a.k.a. the headache--is too high.
One of anything, you come to realize, is enough. Well. One of most things. A second scoop is still OK.
No more will you offer to drive people to the airport or to pick them up. You will make exceptions if (a) the person is debilitated or flat broke; (b) you want those final precious minutes of togetherness with someone you fear you'll never see again; (c) you are, even at your age, in the first deliriously self-sacrificing phases of being smitten; or (d) the person has recently offered to drive you. But the days of you or anyone you know routinely saying, "Let me take you to the airport" are as long-gone as your low-rider jeans.
You will never again wear anything that dips 3 inches below the navel and/or rises 8 inches above the knee. Soon that will include bathing suits.
Ditto for anything involving paisley.
You will never, ever, ever again take the red-eye flight.
And help a friend move, or even less likely, ask for help?
You will never again think naps are just for kids.
You will never again think that people who talk about joint inflammation are hypochondriacs or should just give up wheat. You won't even think they're old.
Never again will you make your own yogurt or grow your own sprouts. If you need to prove you're in touch with the Earth, you can drive to Whole Foods.
Absolutely never again will you sleep on the floor. You will remember fondly that a long, long time ago you were so happy to have a free place to stay that you'd bunk on concrete. Now you can hardly stand to be a guest on a sofa bed. You'd rather take an advance on next week's salary and pay for a decent hotel mattress.
And no, no, no. You are not backpacking through Europe or Guatemala anymore. You are not dreaming of backpacking anywhere anymore. Backpacking now sounds as romantic to you as back pain and dirty hair.
Will you ever again stay up all night? Not if you can help it. And staying awake all night is not the same as being awake all night. The first is called fun. The second is called insomnia. The first is a perk of youth, the second a curse of later age.
Fun. That's the key word here. It's not that as you get older you deny yourself fun. It's that the old fun stops being fun. As the numbers of your age change, you calculate fun differently.
Your range of comfort narrows and you must adapt your behavior to the squeeze. Fun now means being alert and robust. It means rationing your time thoughtfully. It means learning which pleasures wind up as pain.
You may, however, continue to dance, feel your heart flutter for reasons that are not purely medical, and in countless other ways behave as if you're still 29. Which on some days, if you stay away from mirrors and caffeine, you feel certain you still are.
And Gordon Lightfoot's probably drinking decaf now.
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