teetering on the brink

The most recent picture of me taken last December.  I’m on the left in blue.

Today is my birthday and I am 59 years old.  I am on the edge of a whole new decade, a whole new series of numbers.  Mortality is waving at me.  I see it there at the back of the crowd and I am slowly making my way over to it.  I’m doing OK for almost 60.  Life doesn’t seem very much different than a decade ago.  I’m tired of doing certain things, I’m tired of the process of making a living sometimes but then I was tired of those things a decade ago.  Back when I entered the 50s, I was still doing the river guide thing.  I don’t do that anymore but I’ve been pretty consistent about going to the gym for the last 6 years.  My hair is still dark and I don’t color it.  You have to look close to see the  strands of gray.  This was, apparently, the line I was standing in when attractive physical attributes were being handed out.

I was at the gym earlier in the week, talking to two of the friends I have made there who work out in the same time slot, two guys who I figured were about 8 - 10 years younger than me.  We joke around a lot.  When I told them it was my birthday in a few days one of them looked at me straight faced and guessed 49?  I must have given him an incredulous look because his subsequent guesses went lower till he finally sputtered out. ‘Did I guess terribly wrong?’, he asked.  ‘Try 59’, I told him.  ‘You’re hot!’, he says, ‘59, you look great.’  I struck a pose.  He says, ‘you need a T-shirt.’  The other one says, ‘Fine at 59.’  I’ll take it.  

Fine at 59.