Today it has been three quarters of a century since my birth.

Why does that sound like a lot longer than seventy-five years?

I suppose it might be, first, because our measurement of anything contains an attitude, an orientation, that helps us to think about it.  We measure our age in years because it keeps the numbers accessible, manageable.  We know that a century is a very long time, so three quarters of one seems enormous, also.  Seventy-five years since 1947 would also be 27,393 days, an impossible number to remain aware of and celebrate. 

Besides, anniversaries are always a day late.  Today, my seventy-fifth birthday, is actually the first day of my seventy-sixth year of life.  I finished seventy-five full years yesterday.  So, technically, today I celebrate a younger self.  Younger only by one day, but I’ll take that.

I don’t mind being seventy-five years of age.  I actually enjoy it.  I like it.  I don’t believe that I am seventy-five years old, though.  All my life, I think, I have felt either younger or older than my actual age.  At first, that always felt not-old-enough.  I wanted to be older, grown up, an adult.  Then, as I approached the years of life that have been called middle age, I briefly felt as though I were aging too fast.  I wanted to slow it down.  I wanted to give myself more time to learn, to do, to be whatever came into my mind I might be.

I was reminded this morning, that at eighteen I had just completed one year of college, but was not going back to the university, for reasons that are another story.  What I wanted to do was pack up a backpack and hit the road from Massachusetts to California.  I had some vague idea about being a movie actor; but mostly I just wanted to be grown up, to get free of a life that I found small, cramped, too-safe and too-slow.  But I lacked the knowledge of the world and of myself that would have given me the confidence and courage to risk it.

By the time I was twenty-five – the first quarter of my century – I had stumbled along far enough to have a degree plus some graduate studies, a steady job, and a family (one wife, three kids).  By my half-century, I had acquired a second wife, another kid, a career, and still no idea what I was doing most of the time.  But I had begun to realize that time was going too fast, not too slow.  I could see that the chances were rapidly fading of my ever being what my first-quarter-self had dreamed of being.  But I could also see more clearly how I had come to that place.  I could see the choices I could have made, for ill or good, and I could honor the ones I had made for how they had created who I had become.  And, over all, I liked who I had become.

Over the course of my third-quarter, I have encountered personal tragedy and triumph both.  Within the context of the life I have chosen, they carry equal weight.  They have spurred me to greater self-awareness, to clearer social consciousness, to a manageable balance of youth and age.  I have traveled across the country and back twice, I have been off the continent once.  I have retired from my career and have pursued other interests, such as writing, that I never took the time for before.  I have fallen in love and married for the last and best time.  And I am content that I am, at last, both grown up and not old.

I cannot, of course, predict what my next quarter of a century will bring, but I am ready for whatever it gives me time for.  When I was still in my pre-teens, I dreamed (literally, at night, while asleep) that I would live to be ninety-seven years old.  I now feel that I under-estimated.  I look forward to finishing this last quarter of my current century, and perhaps begin another.  But I have stopped growing old in favor of continuing to grow up.