Freak'n at 50 or 50 is the New 35

Today has been my 50th birthday. We really celebrated last week with our Big Birthday Bash at the Carder Rock swim club. 1957 rules! Read this week's US News & World Report: "57--the Year that Changed America".

It's totally bizarre being 50. Older than my father ever was. I feel like 35 on the one hand and 100 on the other. In my mind's eye, I've got Dave and me as doddering old codgers who still work. I imagine only 20 years left, two measly decades, and the years keep flying by faster and faster.

Then again, we could do whatever we with our lives together.

There was a pregnant 50-something woman and a 50-something mother of a four-week-old boy at a baby shower I went to this week. The shower was for a single friend in her mid-forties, who just adopted a four-week-old baby girl with a nice head of brown hair. At 50, she's going to be running after a 5-year-old child. Last fall, I became a certified scuba diver; what next?

So, 50 truly is the new 35.

Thinking It's Friday Elongates Time

When you're young, you grow and change very quickly and time seems to pass slowly, ligubriously. Life is long and luxurious; there is no world without you. Summers spent lieing in the field, making up characters in the rolling sky, clouds morph into dogs, horses, boats, gods and men's faces. You alone lieing on your back in the field next to the forest. Newly cut grass. The odd house not far away, not really yours, imagining the door locked to keep you out.

But as an adult you change very little, but the world spins past you faster and faster and faster.