I have a big birthday coming up in a few months. I won't divulge exactly how old I'll be; let's just say it starts with six and ends with "Oh."
As in, "Oh, my."
Psychologically, this is a hard one. To soften the blow, I've taken to calling myself a "junior-senior." People look perplexed at first, and then they figure it out.
Junior-senior. Not too old; not too young. Just right!
Mark KennedyUnfortunately, the life of a junior-senior can dissolve into work pressures, doctor appointments and generalized worry about the future.
There are reminders everywhere that our time is winding down.
Just last week, a Hamilton County elected official in her 30s was quoted in this newspaper as saying: "Many new CEOs or superintendents come up with ways to sort of weed out some of the older, more expensive and possibly less effective employees who don't align with their vision."
Weed them out?
Well, alrighty, then. Hang on roots, they're a-coming to yank us up.
All this worry about getting older, though, is balanced by life experience. Over time, we learn that worry doesn't help.
But the biggest balancing factor in my life is my 11-year-old son. Our age extremes are like the opposing tips of a high-wire walker's balancing pole. We keep each other from falling.
He was born when I was 48 years old, and I used to obsess about the age gap. How old will I be when he graduates from high school? How about college?
Meanwhile, my son's only worries are learning his homonyms and whether to sign up for band or chorus in sixth grade.
The other day, I came home after work with a head full of worry. Meanwhile, our 11-year-old son was in the kitchen making pancake-size discs out of red "slime."
Slime, he informs me, is a blend of school glue, shaving cream, baking soda, cornstarch and food coloring. He uses his earnings from chores to buy vast quantities of glue and shaving cream at Dollar General, then mixes the "slime" in big plastic containers in the garage.
Last week, the assembly line stretched into the kitchen, where he used a measuring cup to portion out the slime into baggies that he took to school on Valentine's Day to give his classmates.
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"You don't have to use cornstarch," he tells me on the way to school. "But it makes the slime stretchier and snappier.
Like a hummingbird, his focus shifts from one obsession to the next. By Wednesday night he had moved on from slime and had become preoccupied with a little handheld clicker. It had a button in the middle and a digital display with numbers. It looks like something you'd use to do a head count at church.
He immediately turned the little clicker into a tool of competition.
"Daddy, bet you I can punch this 200 times in a minute," he said, getting his mother to set the timer on her watch to prove it.
After she had documented his 200-clicks-a-minute pace, he turned to me and winked.
"That's nothing," I said. "I can do better than that."
"Oh, you cannot," he said.
With that, I snatched the clicker and pounded the button 430 times in a timed minute.
"Wait, that's impossible," he said gawking at the meter. "That's like seven times a second."
"Yep," I said. "Told you."
And suddenly, I felt 11 years old again.
I used to sneer at people who said our children would help keep me young.
Turns out, they were right.
Contact Mark Kennedy at mkennedy@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6645.