There's nothing familiar about turning 60
For the better part of three decades, I've been shrugging off milestone birthdays. Forty: eclipsed by my mother's death two weeks earlier. Fifty: an excuse to squeeze a girlfriends' lunch between my morning and afternoon meetings. Then, last October, I turned 60. I marked the day with my first birthday bash since primary school, but I hated to leave my fifties. Oh, what a glorious decade - like the forties, with more confidence and savvy. Let me tell you, there's nothing familiar about 60.
Age: Just a number - or more?
"Age is just a number," people say. I've probably said it myself. But, at 60, I am now twice 30 - the age at which, in the parlance of my flower-power youth, a person can no longer be trusted. At 60, I wonder if I can trust myself to navigate the years ahead with the same emotional tool kit that had seen me through my rapidly dwindling middle age. I face a perplexing, even shocking new question: "How old is old?" Emotionally speaking, this latest birthday has flipped me upside down, swung me by the feet in a stiff wind and deposited me back on terra firma unsure just where I'm bound.
At least I'm in glamorous company: Meryl Streep and Twiggy, also 60, and Helen Mirren, at 64, are putting the sex appeal in sexagenarian. Looking at their life-burnished faces, I'm tempted to believe the rah-rah slogan (more than 400 million Google citations), "60 is the new 40!" But I know better. My bum knee and complaining shoulder won't allow me to forget. Sixty is the boundary between thinking I have forever to do my growing up, and accepting the fact that I don't.
You might think I'd be a full-fledged adult at this advanced age, but I haven't quite lost the goofiness of girlhood. I still reach for the wrong fork at the occasional candlelit table, still replay awkward conversations and realize too late what I should have said. I still walk down busy streets smiling at my own private jokes, while passersby wonder what's got into me.
Next page: My days belong to me, but won't last forever.
