"Someone has a birthday coming up I see," she said as she handed back my driver's license to me. "Um, yes--a big one," I replied as I wondered how to avoid talking in cliches about birthdays and age. "Oh? What birthday is it?" she asked. "My fiftieth," I said in a normal speaking volume, not the hushed whisper often used when speaking about that particular age or cancer or something else as equally dreaded. No one was in the waiting room with me, so I was spared the admittedly ridiculous ritual of furtively looking around and lowering my voice before telling her what birthday I was soon going to mark.
She abruptly pulled her head up from the computer and stared at me for a few seconds before exclaiming, "Oh, you look a lot younger than that." I gave her a big smile and a quick thank-you, all the while praying she wouldn't get more specific. Please Lady, allow me to bask in the welcome sweet vagueness of "a lot younger than that." But she wanted to keep going. "You look like you're 42!" she gushed, as if she were giving me a great compliment. 'Aw f*ck -- there it is,' I thought.
At the risk of sounding like an ungrateful jerk, I find being tagged anywhere in my forties sounds old. Agewise, I'm now so advanced, even my age compliments sound old to me. Coming from a cute woman in her late 20s, it felt like she was really saying, 'You look like you're only *slightly* over the hill.'
I wish I could resolve my ambivalent feelings about turning the big 5 - 0. I often feel lucky when people occasionally think I look younger than my actual age. But almost as often, I feel embarrassed that I am not-so-reluctantly buying into the absurdity that it's just better to be younger -- as if one had a choice in the matter.
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