Today is my 63rd birthday. I give to you today a repost of the entry wrote I about my 25th and my 50th birthdays. Today will be far quieter, but I wanted to drop in to say that my 50s were wonderful and my sixties, Covid aside, have been good. I think I’ve got this aging thing down.
The following was written 4 days after the epic party when I could finally write about it without crying.
Approaching my 25th birthday, I had a midlife crisis. Having always been precocious, the early advent of said crisis shouldn’t have been a surprise. But it was.
At 25, so I thought, I had to grow up and be an adult. I needed to pay my bills on time, get my oil changed, quit wasting money, and become a responsible (unmarried) matron.
Appalled at such a future, I threw myself a birthday party – the last blowout of my misspent youth before donning sensible shoes and alphabetizing my spice jars.
At the time, I lived in Milwaukee with the ex who was not yet a husband. We had a house in the city on a tiny lot in a solid, staid working-class neighborhood. Knowing the party had the potential to get out of hand, we invited the entire neighborhood thinking if folks were invited they were less likely to complain.
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W. Va. Fur and Root 