“The Sun is the Same in a Relative Way, But You're Older...

...shorter of breath and one day closer to death.”

The title and subtitle of this post are lines from “Time”, from Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon” album, which turns 50 this year and is maybe the greatest piece of music ever recorded along with Beethoven’s 9^th and “What Does the Fox Say.”
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Elizabeth and I recently celebrated our 20^th wedding anniversary.

Twenty years. Seems unlikely. Impossible, maybe, but here we are.

And it got me thinking about the relative difference of 20-year intervals at various stages in our lives:

- Age 10 to age 30: It’s like a whole lifetime. Multiple lifetimes. When we’re 10, we’re functionally useless. Sure, we can walk and talk and laugh and cry. But we’re effectively a drain on society, the economy, pretty much everything. We produce NOTHING and consume EVERYTHING: Food, tax dollars, Oreos.

- Age 30-50: Hmmm. Sure, these are prime earning years and theoretically we are better off when we’re 50 than when we’re 30, but 30 to 50 is not nearly as radical a change as is 10-30.

- I am now almost halfway through the 50-70 era. I can honestly say that other than a few additional aches and pains, I don’t feel all that different now than I did when I was 50. Or 40. Yes, I did have a health “hiccup” a couple of weeks before my 50^th birthday, but I feel good. It’s all good.

I hope I can say that same when I am halfway through the 70-90 era, which sometimes feels as if it’s approaching like that truck coming through the tunnel directly at a dumbfounded Wile E. Coyote.

We were looking though our wedding album and marveling at some of the changes that correspond to the “10-30” paragraph, above. Since Elizabeth and I got married in our late 30s, we had the great fun of having a number of kids – nieces, nephews, godsons – at our wedding. On the day of our ceremony, these runts ranged in age from about three to 10 years old.

Now, they are variously married/working/finished with or making their way through graduate school/sporting better facial hair than I could ever dream of/living in far-flung corners of the country. They are, to a person, great young adults who are now making their own ways in the world in their own ways.

Elizabeth? Looks about the same age or maybe a bit younger.

Me: A few (thousand) more grey hairs and some additional pounds, but… meh. Pretty much the same handsome devil that rocked that tuxedo in February 2003.

After ruminating over those wedding photos, I got to thinking about measuring my life in units other than years.

Two specifically:

• Cars: The older I get, the less interested I am in spending money on depreciating assets like cars. Elizabeth cares even less about cars. Her car, a 2011, has about 60,000 miles and my car, a 2015, just rolled past 50,000 miles. We don’t commute to work and don’t really go anywhere in the cars, as evidenced by the exceedingly low miles per year we have each racked up.
  
  So, there is a reasonably good chance that these will be the second-to-last or even last cars we’ll ever own, barring some major mechanical failure, theft or a crash. That’s right - I would estimate there is better than 50/50 chance that we NEVER buy another car. I am at the end of life, car-buying-wise. It’s a bracing thought.
  
  

• Exercise/athletics: I was never an athlete in my youth. No little league or pee wee football. The zenith of my athletic career was being an avid triathlete in adulthood. I was pretty average, but dedicated, and did about 125 triathlons and at least that many running races before my heart shit the bed and ended all racing for me. Due to some more recent back problems, Elizabeth and I have taken up Pilates, which has the vague feeling of being in the hallway leading to Death’s anteroom. Don’t get me wrong. Pilates is great and has had VERY beneficial results since we started going. But it’s quite a different feeling than diving into the ocean at 7:00 AM with 1000 other lunatics on race Sunday. Walking into the Pilates studio as Muriel, the 96-year-old retired town librarian is finishing up her class doesn’t exactly scream “bad ass.”
  
  To properly illustrate the remainder of my life in athletic units, I created a VERY detailed and meticulously researched graph that accurately maps my life’s sports trajectory:

It’s all downhill from here.

Einstein may have been right about time being relative and slowing down as we approach the speed of light, but time seems to speed UP as we move inexorably toward the light (the one at the end of the tunnel.) And life’s milestones simultaneously get more and less significant as we head toward our inevitable demise.

All that said, I wouldn’t have it any other way, as these past 20 years have been the happiest of my life, thanks to Elizabeth, and if I’m lucky, I’ll spend many more happy years with her doing Pilates and bingo before she gets to turn my ashes into a diamond necklace.

Though if I have it my way, she will turn them into a diamond turntable stylus and drop the needle on my beloved copy of “Dark Side of the Moon.”