Reaching 30

The Boston Herald

He isn't all that old. And neither am I. That's what I've been telling myself. And I'm right, if I compare myself to Mrs. Lamb, who a few months ago flew from New York City, where she lives, to California to help celebrate  her son's 70th birthday.

"Did you dream when you were a little girl playing dolls that you'd ever have a 70-year-old son never mind be around to help him blow out the candles on his 70th birthday?" I asked her.

"Never," she said laughing, fully aware that numbers don't lie but suspicious of them just the same. "Seventy. How did he get to be 70?”

That's how I feel today. It's my son's 30th birthday, and I am stunned by that two-digit number. Thirty? How can this be? Wasn't I just 30? How did he get to be so close to my age? 

I am even more surprised by the way that number has softened over the years. It had sharp edges when it applied to me. I thought I was old at 30. I knew I was old. But I know with certainty that my son is still young.

I tell him this, but he doesn't believe me. He feels the pressure of 30, the number a demarcation between youth and non-youth  even now, though life span is increasing and old age has been pushed back a decade. Thirty is 30, and it's only when you're long past it that it doesn't seem like a giant crater in the sand.

So he feels old, today, just as I felt old when I wasn't, just as people have always felt when this birthday arrives. And maybe that's a good thing, to be aware of the clock, to at least recognize that it's there ticking away and you have only one life to live and this is it. 

I say to him: "It's just a number and it's just a day. Nothing is going to change. You still have your whole life ahead of you.”

But the thing about 30 is you don't see it that way. You see with  real acuity all that's been lived and all that's gone and you get the sense, for the first time really, of how quickly everything passes. How when you were playing whiffle ball every day, you couldn't imagine a time when you wouldn't be playing whiffle ball. And how that was already eons ago, the time between childhood and 30, a chasm.

My father, when he's being philosophical, asks, "How old would you feel if no one told you how old you are?" his point being that as long as you feel young, you are young. But for those experiencing 30, age is more than a state of mind, it's a psychological juncture at which the mind rears up and says:  "Let's  take a timeout and look at your life. Are you where you thought you'd be?  Are you doing what you want to be doing? Is this the road you want to be on the rest of your life?”

It's a milestone, right up there with starting school and graduating from school and moving away from home.

I began to write when I was 30. It was time. But I felt so old, at  the starting line while everyone else was thick in the race. I felt time was against me.  It wasn't. But no one could tell me this and the truth is that feeling the pressure of time was a good thing. It made me try harder. It kept me focused. 

My son insists he is old at 30, though he is so far from old it's funny.  But he will not realize this until he is old. Only then will 30 look like what it has always been, a rest stop on life's highway, a place to pull over and check the map to make sure you know where you're going.

An exciting place to be.