The profound significance of turning 50 did not hit me in the months before my rendezvous with chronological destiny. In fact, I was rather looking forward to the milestone, and revelling in the gratuitous, and largely fabricated compliments, customarily paid to those who hit the big five-oh. But like a bug meeting its maker on the windshield of life, now that 50 has hit me, all I seem to hear these days is "Splat."
On the Big Day, I opened the fridge where my wife stored the birthday cake. There, resting on the icing was a large wax candle bearing the number 50. That's a big candle, I thought.
Then I saw the number. That's a big number, too. It's half-a-century, I thought.
In months since, the number 50 has doggedly followed me around like a shadow. For instance, I was helping my daughter with her math homework recently. No matter how we dealt with one particular equation, the answer always came up 50. The same week, my son asked some questions for social studies: how many states are there in the United States? "Fifty," I grumble.
I couldn't open the newspaper not long ago without seeing references to the 50th anniversary of the 1956 Hungarian revolution or that it has been 50 years since the Suez Crisis. And when the radio is on, Paul Simon always seems to be singing Fifty Ways to Leave your Lover.
When I need cash from the bank, the teller now seems to give me 50s instead of 20s, and I have to wince at my son's hockey games when they ask me I if want to buy "Fifty-fifty" tickets. When I innocently ask a waitresses what beer they carry in the hope that Guinness is on tap, all I seem to hear about is some special on "Labatt 50." ( Yuck!) I'm sure if I were given the task of redrawing the constellations based on my own experience this year, there would be no archers, crabs, or fish in the heavens, but I'd end up joining all the dots till the number 50 showed up in the sky where Orion's belt used to be.
Truly, my middle age has become a state of mind as much as a state of mine.
One problem with being 50 is that I can remember not being 50. In fact, I can remember my favourite moments of 20, 25 or 30 years ago as if the moments happened . . . well, moments ago. It's not so much the fact that my hearing, my waistline and my libido aren't quite what they were when I was 25; it's the fact that I can remember 25 as though 25 happened yesterday.
But the other problem with being 50 is the mind-games I can play with the same numbers.
Just as I can project backward, and a not-so-familiar fragrance or song will transport me to a moment in 1981 faster than a time machine ever could, if I project forward by the same number of years, the answer is always 75.
So having calculated the distance between various ages of my life and 50 as though it were one of my daughter's math problems, I know that the time between my daughter's birth and this morning's breakfast is the distance between breakfast and 65, and the distance from 20 to today is the distance between today and 80.
Mathematicians might look at these numbers and dispassionately say, "Time passes." Philosophers might resort to irony and say, "Time stays the same; we pass." When I look at these numbers, all I see is that I am passing, and I'm running out of time.
But turning 50 doesn't mean I'm quite ready to put deposits down on cemetery plots and take up bridge or lawn bowling. What it does do, though, is to allow me to focus on deadlines; namely mine.
I've got perhaps 30 statistical years left. By this point in my life, I have to confess I'm comfortable in my skin, even if it sags a little. I am able to tell people "This is who I am" and not get hung up if someone else doesn't like it, or me. I don't look back on my life and curse the gods that I wasn't a Beatle, or didn't get chosen for the rep hockey team when I was 12, or win the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour at 49.
Like Eric Idle whistling a song from the Cross in Life of Brian, I have to look on the bright side of death. Despite feeling a tad older these days, I am fortunate to be able to say that if I were hit by a wayward bus tomorrow, I would have no regrets about my life, except for the bus.
But I am in no hurry to meet a bus with my name on it. There are, as they say, mountains to climb, books to write, medals to win, places to go, and people to meet.
What I have to do is make sure I do all this mountain climbing, book writing and people meeting sooner rather than later.
Tony Wilson lives in Vancouver.