A Nice Age To Be

I can't wait to get to the four or five books I might already have read if I hadn't been reading the thousand page middle book of a trilogy by George R.R. Martin. I finished "A Clash of Kings" last night about two minutes after I had finally sorted out all the central characters. The book's appendix lists all the players at the back of the book and takes over twenty pages to do so, so keeping track of all but the most important secondary characters was far beyond my abilities. I can't imagine how old George R.R. (Roy Rogers? Ronald Reagan? Robert Redford?) managed to do it himself. Must be nice to have talent. Now I have to avoid finding the last book of the three , so I can get some other reading done. I'm not one of those guys who can spend a lifetime reading Proust or Balzac or even Shakespeare to the exclusion of others. Variety is the spice of life as Willy Shakes (surely another seven) tells us, so bring on the P.D. James and Richard Russo. (George Richard Russo Martin?)

And speaking of lifetimes, today I am officially closer to age seventy than I am to sixty. Oddly, that doesn't bother me at all. I'm quite comfortable being a sixty something and seventy no longer sounds all that old. Turning forty was the last time I stressed over a birthday. I didn't like hitting that milestone one bit. The twenties and thirties were all nice ages to be. They were still young and full of hope and promise. Then forty came around and I morphed into Jack Benny for the next decade. "That's right, I'm 39." After fifty, age no longer mattered to me so I owned up proudly to my actual number. Somewhere in that decade, I realized the age of my "self", my "essence" (whatever it is) had become constant and didn't get any older with each passing birthday. I don't know exactly what that age is, it may in fact me timeless, but I can tell you one thing, it's not forty. I'll never be forty and you shouldn't either. It's depressing.