Six and Twenty

At 12:00 midnight, I turned 26 while at Pam's house today. Happy Birthday!

There is really nothing special about the age of 26. At 13, one becomes at teenager; at 16, one can drive, and at 18, he is inundated by a deluge of new entitlements. Twenty-one is special because that age affords one the rights to drink alcohol and to gamble (fun, though not really two privileges that I have taken the license to enjoy). After 25 (the age at which one can rent a motor vehicle), there really isn't much for which to wait until 30, when one is constitutionally old enough to serve as a United States senator. Although I have some personal aspirations and objects of anticipation for the coming year, there really isn't any institutionalized benefit to turning 26.

So 26 is just about getting a little older, and feeling the aging process. I have this strange, schizophrenic relationship with my age. Sometimes I feel very young, for example: the time my student mistook me for a classmate. I was substituting for an SAT II biology class, and when I announced, "okay, it's time to start class," with a startled look she replied, "oh, are you the teacher? I thought you were a student!" When pressed to give a precise, numeric estimation of my age, she proffered up "17." Yay.

At other times, I can feel the cruel effects of time's merciless assualt on my physical and psychological being, namely the thinning of my hair and gradual decline of my once-rapid metabolism. I could lament the passing of my youth in more detail, but the entries I've already published regarding age already testify to my neurotic fixation with that dreaded topic.

Below is "Loveliest of trees, the cherry now," by A.E. Houseman's , a poet I re-discovered when I was studying for the GRE literature exam. Of course, the poem's focus is not really aging, but the speaker's urgent need to bask in the beauty of nature in his youth.

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.

Now, of my three score years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.