Old man M@

So, I had an odd feeling last night, I was trying to go to bed, and I was reflecting on some of the days events. I talked with a friend of mine today who is a little bit older than me. He is going to turn 40 in a little bit, so than I can officially call him an “old man”. The odd thing is that as I was laying in bed thinking about it, I realized that he was only a few years ahead of me, and that if a relatively short time, I will be turning 30. It was not that long ago that 25 seemed old and that 30 was impossibly old, but that is where I find myself slowly progressing. The thing that really struck me is that I may joke with my friend, but I never really looked at him or his wife as OLD, they were my friends, which I guess makes them not old, because they are my friends? (I know that makes all kinds of circular logic) The big shock that actually made me sit up in bed and start to try and write this out was that my friend has a son who is in first grade so about 7 years old, I realized that when I was about 7, my dad would have been about 40. So, this could in fact be me looking at what my father and I were like 20 something years ago. I guess that I view my father as a slow moving older guy, just kinda rolling through life. I view my friend and super active, and we go on wicked long bicycle trips together and he lifts weights and was climbing around on the roof taking down x-mass lights. On the other hand, one of my greatest memories from growing up was when I was about 6 or 7, I would go for a ride with my father on his bicycle, but we did not have the kiddy chair, or the drag along trailer, so my father would ride, and I would ride on my fathers shoulders, with my legs around his neck and my arms stretched out like the wings of an air plane, helmets, hell no, just bombing down the road on an old bike, in the grandest sense of the word, FREE. Of course some people had issues with my fathers choice of transporting me, and for some reason they thought that it was excessively dangerous, but I remember it, and it was exhilarating. So, I guess that I can look at my friend and think that once upon a time, my father was like that, and in some hypothetical sense, in a few years, I might end up like that. That was the thing that scared me, that some day, I might get old, maybe, if I live that long.

The other significant thing that occurred over lunch, Sam the son of said friend, was sitting next to me at the table. We were all just sitting around breaking bread together; I was going to relate a funny story that happened to me the day before. So I started off, “so, I was making cookies yesterday…” and I got interrupted by Mr. Sam, who piped in with, “Dad, why is Matt so strong, but he still bakes cookies?” I may have gotten the exact words wrong, but the main point was that it seemed a contradiction to him that a “strong” guy would be one who also makes cookies, that cookies are not a manly thing to make. It was a true point of confusion for him; he views me as a “manly man”(yea he did call me that) yet I challenge that by making cookies something un-manly. It was funny because the group all turned to address this major issue. So, I did not really get to tell my funny story, but hey, that’s life engh?

M@
"Oh! Come and see the violence inherent in the system! Help, help! I'm being repressed!" ~Monty Python