MARY’S FIFTIETH BIRTHDAY
I gave her a box of chocolate stars, fifty chocolate stars. She ate one right away. “I think it’s going to be the best decade of my life,” Mary said. “I have this strong feeling.”
I spend most of my time with fifty year olds and twenty year olds and it occurs to me this morning, in the wake of my dear amazing friend Mary’s turning 50, that these two ages have a lot in common, fifty and twenty. It’s thirtysomethings who’ve become mysterious to me, like lynx or ibex…I see them rarely and they are gorgeous but what are they about? What do they want? Babies, houses, promotions? God, youth, arugula? I do not know them anymore. I’m trying to be more than just polite to them. There are some in my neighborhood. I know how hard it is. I remember: money, fertility, the roof repair, the insomnia, the childhood, the baby baby baby, relentless baby thing. Planting all those things that died. (Note to self: I need to cultivate a friendship with a representative from this decade. I have eighty year old friends, and four year old friends, but no thirties.)
This past week, I’ve spent a trillion hours writing recommendation letters for fretful twenty year olds on the brink of their next new decade (No roofs! No babies! No Joneses!). Their statements of purpose, while horribly written, are about their quest for meaning, for more. And then last night, it hit me, when I was at the restaurant, celebrating Mary, one of four women, averaging exactly fifty years old a piece, Mary turning fifty: we are exactly like the twenty year olds.
We, too, are thinking almost exclusively about our creative work, service, travel, our education, ourselves, our growth, our place in the world. We aren’t thinking about clothes, things, or children. We’re over youth, the house, arugula. Like the twenty year olds, we are on brink of a similarly scary, new, free, mysterious, exciting chunk of living. We’re done with our parents, and our children are done with us. At fifty, we’re just us, like at twenty: earnest, fearless, adventurous, generous, and just slightly better funded. In both cases, we know what we are doing, the territory ahead is completely unknown, and in that tension there is an enormous amount of energy and creative opportunity.
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