Time Passages

In my little blog profile underneath the bird icon, it says that one of the main things I deal with here at The Singing Bird is “turning 40.” It’s about time to address that because, well, I’m turning 40…on Monday.

And the first thing I want people to know about me and getting older is that I love to do it. I crave birthdays–other people’s, as well as my own. Not sure why, but I am truly a celebrator of “the birthday season.” For years (until this one, actually), I even celebrated my half-birthday: March 18th. Some of my friends even sent me cards for my half-birthday because I would frekken talk about it so much. Because, being the 0.5 mark, I would get to “round up” on that day. Because I LIKED getting older.

I suppose it’s because I have hung out with people older than me for most of my adult life that I enjoyed aging. My husband is 11 years older than me, and most of our friends fall somewhere in between. I stopped coloring my hair for a while, too, because, ya know, gray was cool. And I do have a lot of gray. One of my friends calls it “salt and pepper.” But it’s back to a nice toasty-reddish-brown these days.

Because, lately, for the first time, I haven’t wanted my birthday to arrive. Dread would be the more accurate way to describe my attitude to Monday. It’s not like Monday’s going to be radically altered from Sunday or Tuesday, or 40 radically altered from 39 or 41, right? Yet the world does seem to treat it as a line in the sand. More so than 30 or 35, which I didn’t even blink at.

Part of it is the reproductive thing. For women, 40 is that moment when, magically, and for better or worse, some hormonal wand is waved over your ovaries, causing them to begin the shriveling and dessicating process. Eggs abandon ship, endocrine levels fluctuate wildly, cycles get all skewy. Not really, of course. Not right away. Or maybe, already, years ago. But the culture–and my reproductive endocrinologist–would have you believe that the day you turn 40, the uterine wars begin.

Part of it is the cliche thing. You know, the mid-life crisis. Or the beginning of The Change. Or the “We Card Under 40 Here” sign. Or the “40 Is The New 30″ line. Or the idea of becoming a wise woman, a creative woman, as opposed to a pro-creative one. And, on the phone this morning, my father repeated to me that all-time winner of a cliche, “you’re only as old as you feel.” Or maybe it was, “you’re only as old as you think you are.” Well, fuck. I don’t FEEL wise. I don’t particularly FEEL creative these days. And I apparently missed the boat on being pro-creative. So, fuck, What. Am. I. Doing. Here?

Maybe it’s the metric system. Yeah, that’s right. The Metric System. That way of measuring the world by tens that they insisted to us in elementary school we were absolutely, positively going to need to know when we grew up. So, here’s how I figure it…right now, right this minute, at the age of 39, I can reach back in my mind to my twenties pretty easily. A mere 10 years ago…29. But come Monday, my twenties will recede like a bullet train into the distant past because then, my mind will reach back 10 years and think…30. My twenties will forever be walled off from the present moment by being on The Other Side of my thirties. Not that my twenties were any big whoop. I’m just sayin’: The decade hop no longer brings me back that far.

Speaking of my dad, he has a theory about aging. At least he did a while ago, when he first told me about his theory of “the glumph.” He must have been about 65 then. The Theory of The Glumph makes a lot of sense. He maintained that, day to day, we don’t really experience getting older. We are busy, we go about our lives, we succeed, we fail, we just generally jump through our hoops. But then, on certain days, in certain years, we have a “Glumph” moment. We suddenly realize, oh, shit. I’m older. I’m quite a bit older than the last time I Glumphed. How the fuck did that happen because as far as I knew I was riding along this life train and all-of-a-sudden, Glumph, I’m at a station I don’t recognize. (Please note: this is a paraphrase of my dad. My dad would never say “fuck.” Except in 1988 when the Redskins won the Superbowl. Then I do believe I heard him say, “Fucking unbelievable!” for the first and only time. But he had had some scotch.)

Maybe there’s really something to this 40 thing. Something special. Something remarkable. A reason why the fashion magazines delineate the clothing spreads into “What to Wear in Your 20-30s” versus “What to Wear in Your 40s” that stands apart from the commercial hype. As I try to adjust my attitude a bit in anticipation of the inevitable, I’ve been thinking about the number 40. It does have some mystical associations in our culture. But I found another blogger who says it much, much better than I was going to, so–with her blessing–I’m going to quote her instead. She has a blog called 1,167, which refers to the number of days she has left until she turns 40. In her welcome post, she explains it this way:

I know, at face value forty is just a number, not inherently any more or less significant than 39 or 41. But it is a number charged with meaning all the same. In the story of the Great Flood, it rained for 40 days and 40 nights. The Israelites wandered 40 years in the desert. Christ spent 40 days in the wilderness. In the Judeo-Christian culture, anyway, forty seems to mark the end of soujourn, a time of deliverance and re-emergence. It is the number of retrospection, and of looking ahead to the next epoch. A time to collect oneself.

It seems to be a liminal number. Like the bordertime between day and night, the turn of a season, or the edge of the woods. One of the thin places. Look at all the nervous energy it provokes in people. “Lordy, lordy, look who’s forty!” We sense the magic in the number, the sheerness of it. We bring to the occasion the same air of mockery and bravado with which we approach Halloween, another of the bordertimes.

She is also a poet. Poets like to think about time, like to think of it in metaphorical terms. After all, time–more than any other single construct–makes us human. Even more than language itself. The idea of 40 as a “thin place,” a place of sheerness, a border, appeals to me as a poet. I thought of my thirties (very unromantically) as a garage. A place to work on myself, a place of overhaul. I prefer this idea of 40, as a time to collect oneself. Is that ass-backwards? Probably.

And, despite likening one’s 40th birthday to encountering a thin place, I’ll be spending my birthday in one of the thickest places I can think of: Vegas. Not exactly fodder for retrospection and sheerness, unless you count what the Folies are wearing. However, R. has a trade show for the palm tree farm there next week, and so we’re combining the two events. I probably won’t post again until we get back.

But I will be looking at the moon on Sunday-Monday, as the Chinese Moon Festival, which falls every year on the 15th day of the eighth lunar month, falls this year on the eve of my 40th birthday. And maybe my daughter-of-the-future will be over there somewhere looking at the moon on Sunday night. So, I will be too.