The Big 5-0

Life Expectancy

"One always expects more life..."

(Image from Wikipedia)

Not the Hawaii 5-0, though the Big 5-0 can hit you in the face like a nice Hawaiian Punch.

And those cultural references date me already. Yes, I turn 50 today, for I was born on May 14th, way back in 1957 -- a mere 4 years after the end of the Korean War and only 12 years after WWII. These days, I teach about such things as part of history, and my students look at me in wonder when they find out that I was born so soon after those enormously momentous events.

When I was a little kid, however, both of those wars felt to me more deeply buried in the past than did WWI, for I lived with my maternal grandparents, who kept on their bedroom wall a large photo of Grandpa Perryman and his brother, Uncle Joe, dressed in their doughboy uniforms, ready to fight the Germans way back when that was a fight against the arrogant German Kaiser rather than the far more frightening German Führer.

Just down the highway from our place was a log building that served as a meeting hall for the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW), of whom my grandpa was one, obviously. He used to keep his WWI helmet and rifle in our house and occasionally take them with him to the VFW meetings. I imagined that he was heading off to war...

He was already 65 or more years old, having been born in 1895.

But he was young compared to his mother-in-law, Grandma Shell, who was born about 1877 and took a liking to me. She spoke to me of the Civil War as though she had lived it -- despite having been born as long after that as I had been after WWII.

Now that I have taught so much history, none of these great events seem so far in the past, but one thing that you learn from life, I suppose, is that the past can't be undone. The world might have become a better place if Europe hadn't taken a wrong path in 1914, for we might have avoided both Soviet Communism and German Fascism and the millions of deaths that these ideologies brought in their wake. Colonialism might have had a softer, more democratic landing.

Korea wouldn't have been divided, nor would it have experienced its own civil war. And yet ... I might not have met Sun-Ae. Sa-Rah and En-Uk might not have existed. I might not have existed. That's always been one of the objections to time travel, that in undoing the past, one undoes oneself, whereby one cannot undo the past, for one does not exist. It boggles the mind.

Perhaps turning 50 should also boggle my mind. Amba of AmbivaBlog has written of turning 50, and some boggling seems to have taken place for her:

Nine years ago, when I was 52 and just emerging from the shock of "the death of youth" -- what Sara Davidson calls "the narrows" and my dreams insisted was a "dark wood" -- I started writing a book of short essays about this life passage, which nothing had prepared me for.

Amba didn't finish the book, but she has recently resuscitated some of those essays on her blog, which you can read through in two posts.

So far, the big 5-0 hasn't done much boggling with my mind. Maybe it will, but I've all along noticed my body aging as I've said good-bye to various things. I used to play a lot of basketball, and I noticed quite early on, about my mid-twenties or so, that physical decline had set in. An inability to consistently dunk two-handed. Then one-handed. Then failing to block shots. Then having one's own shots consistently blocked. Then giving up on basketball...

Recently, people around my age but from an earlier me have been getting in touch, perhaps because we're all hitting the big 5-0 and want to see who's survived.

Well, everybody, at 50 years, "I'm Still Here."