It was my twenti-mhtph class reunion last night.
I didn’t go.
But I did get to talk to folks who were at the reunion. T. called me amidst it all, then passed the phone to one person after another.
It was very loud.
I’m not sad I wasn’t there. I managed to miss all previous reunions, and, unlike in previous years, I wouldn’t have minded attending, but a trip back to SmallTown just was not happening.
B. filled me in a bit, today. I try to remember to call all of my friends and family members on or near their birthdays; B.’s day fell on a mad grading day, so it wasn’t until this weekend that we managed to connect. Anyway, she noted that a lot of people looked much the same as they had, some of the guys had gotten fat, one woman looked really, really old, and one of our classmates had gone completely around the bend.
Cameras-in-the-forest, president-not-born-in-US around the bend.
Everyone else seemed to have retained his or her sanity, however, and even Mr. Alternate Reality apparently entertained more than he offended. (It also apparently helped that another classmate basically served as his minder.)
So we’re halfway to the end. Does this make us old, or young? We are, thank the gods, no longer teenagers, but are we old? We ache and dye our hair and talk about our health, but we still have hair to dye and health to discuss, and we’re mobile enough that we can generate aches.
We’re forty-xmpthish: One lifetime down, one to go. Does that seem like so much more or not much more?
Who knows. It’s all we’ve got.
It’ll have to do.
AbsurdBeats 
1. When I first started reading your blog, I presumed you to be much younger than me. (Than I). At a certain point, I realized that you much be somewhere in your 30s, so, you know, not that much younger. Now I see that you are, apparently, just about exactly my age. I find this oddly wonderful.
2. I love your use of “-mhtph.” It is excellent. (And “We ache and dye our hair and talk about our health, but we still have hair to dye and health to discuss, and we’re mobile enough that we can generate aches.”)
3. I have been musing on many of the same things lately, and have reached much the same conclusion. To quote Ma Ingalls, “We’ll have to cut our coat to fit our cloth.” Indeed.
Ah, the wisdom of those who lived in little houses on prairies or in big woods.
By the way, did you read the piece in the New Yorker about Laura Ingalls Wilder? Turned out to be a bit of a nut.
Helluva storyteller, tho’.
As to the over/under on years: yesterday I had a student, tentatively and apologetically, respond to my storytelling with a question about how different things were when I was young.
‘What—I’m so old?’
Ohhh, she was apologetic. . . .