50

There it is. In print. Two little numbers. A 5 and a 0.

I will turn 50 this month.  I am surprisingly okay about typing it, saying it, being it.  I just wish I could figure out how in the world it happened so quickly.

My parents were married in 1956, less than four months after they met. They laugh because they married so quickly that some people assumed they "had to" get married. I'm sure those same people were quite surprised when I didn't come along until 1961!  When I was born, my mom was 25 and dad was 28 - practically ancient by the standards of the day.

I grew up as an only child in the 1960s and 1970s.

• I could play outside with my friends anywhere "within yelling distance" (my mom's parameters) until the lightning bugs came out or the streetlights came on - whichever happened first.
• My friends and I played with Barbie dolls and Matchbox cars. We played board games. We played freeze tag and kickball. We rode bikes. We stopped only long enough to gulp down some Kool-Aid that someone's mom brought outside in paper cups.
• My first television memory is watching the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show on a tiny black and white TV with my parents. Honestly.
• I remember when we got our first color television and how beautiful the June Taylor dancers (on The Jackie Gleason Show) were in color.
• Since my little town was strategically located between Grissom Air Force Base in Peru, Indiana and Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, sonic booms would rattle me on my swingset at least once a week.
• My best friend, Dawn, lived a couple of blocks down the street and I probably spent as much time with her family as my own. I couldn't begin to count the number of times they fed me or how many nights I spent at their house.
• We watched the Vietnam War play out on the television news and my mom wore a POW bracelet for one of her high school classmates until the day he came home. She then gave it to him at their class reunion the following year.
• Apollo and the Saturn V rocket were always in the back of my mind. I watched the moon landing and followed the coverage of Apollo 13 as my parents prayed for the stranded astronauts' safe return.
• My dad went to work at a factory every day and my mom stayed home and took care of me, going back to work once I entered high school.
• We took a road trip family vacation every summer. We stayed in motels (not hotels), brought along a cooler in the trunk, and ate bologna sandwiches for lunch every day; but I saw amazing amounts of the country from the backseat of that station wagon! Beautiful places - national parks, cities, parts of Canada too!
• I walked every single day to elementary school, junior high, and high school.
• My mom and dad and I put together five different jigsaw puzzles during the Blizzard of 1978 when there were only four channels on television and even those weren't working part of the time because of power problems.
• My first car was a Pinto and I didn't get it until I saved up the money from a summer job (at the factory where my dad worked) to pay cash for it. (I was a second shift gear cutter for three months!)

I blinked after college and suddenly I'm getting ready to turn 50 next week.

I clearly remember asking my mom how it felt to be "half a century old" when she turned 50. (I was a smart-mouthed 25-year-old.) Ironically, my 75-year-old mom remembers that comment too and reminded me of it recently.  I honestly think I'm a younger 50 than my mom was then. My life hasn't been nearly as hard as hers. I didn't live through the Great Depression and World War II. I've routinely had vaccines and medical treatments that weren't even an option for her.

So, I'm not sure what 50 is supposed to feel like, but I don't think I'm feeling it and I guess that's a good thing.  I'll admit that I appreciate it when people tell me I don't look 50 either, but I'm not any clearer about what 50 should look like than I am about what it should feel like.

Oh - by the way...

Did you know that you start getting mailings and propaganda from AARP about a month before your 50th birthday? : )