By Pam MansellHerald Writer
By Pam Mansell
Herald Writer
OU MAY THINK this is just an ordinary summer day, a flag day like many others that have come before it, but it's much, much more than that _ at least for me.
It's the first day that I am officially over 50.
Yesterday was my 50th birthday, and, as you will notice in the next several paragraphs, I am still trying to grasp the cosmic significance of this event. Or, in the alternative, figure out if there is any significance at all.
My first thought yesterday morning was that I didn't feel old enough to be 50. But then, as I lay in bed musing on my impending oldness, it hit me: exactly how old was 50 supposed to feel? Would my bones creak and crack as I rolled out of bed? Would my muscles be soft, flabby jelly? Would I look in the mirror and discover my face had sagged overnight and was now a mass of wrinkles, dotted with aging, watery eyes?
I decided to stay in bed a little longer rather than face those possibilities, and think about this age thing a bit more.
My mother-in-law, who is now 85, told me when she was about 70 that she found the process of aging a mystifying experience. ``I don't feel any older than I did when I was 20,'' she said. ``I just can't do as many things.''
Or, as another woman put it recently, ``Age is a state of mind. It's just that my body doesn't know that.''
My theory is that our inner selves have an age that stays constant. Mine, I think, is somewhere around 24, about a year and two months after I was married, and exactly a year after my husband returned from Vietnam whole and healthy and we started on our lives together. That time was so intensely joyous, is so firmly fixed in my memory, that it is the core of who I am _ the person I will always be, no matter how old I get.
I can't truthfully say I've been too worried about turning 50. When you're one of the original baby boomers there are just too darn many other things to worry about. Pick up any paper from the past six months and you're likely to find some story about us. Either our vast numbers are skewing the balance of old and young and we're going to put the American economy out of whack, or we're speeding up the drain on Social Security funds and forcing it to go belly up even faster than it was going to do on its own.
Our history is there for everyone to see. We came of age in the turbulent '60's and changed music and morals. We abandoned the sturdy traditions of our World War II-era parents. We challenged the idea of ``our country, right or wrong.'' We turned on, tuned out _ and we got older.
Really, there have been so many headlines about baby boomers turning 50 this year that my own birthday seems somewhat of an anticlimax.
Looking back over this rambling birthday treatise, I see I have one big correction to make. I used the word ``old'' a little too often. One gentleman I met Wednesday told me he'd made the same mistake, referring to a lady in her 80's as his ``old English teacher.''
``I'm your FORMER English teacher,'' she shot back. As for old, there's no such thing, she noted. It's ``chronologically gifted.''
Pam Mansell covers New Wilmington for The Herald.