Who's Counting? Age is Just a Number. Literally.

I had the strangest interaction with my Agephobia (yes, it's a condition) this week. Some days I forget I have it. In certain moments I feel ageless or even young, and sometimes I'm just distracted enough by shiny things like debt calculations or meetings with internet marketers at least a decade my junior that it slips my mind -- my spiny, ceaseless age-panic.

I've made no secret of the fact that I'm consumed with thoughts of time, or more accurately, with thoughts of how little I fear I have left of it. I wonder endlessly about the origin of this obsession. Could it be my harried urban lifestyle? My checkered, thrill-seeking past? Is it because our friends are having second babies? Or perhaps it's because I spend so little time doing what I want to be doing that each precious second is fried up like onion skin in hot oil and made dehydrated and lifeless. In my rear view mirror I can see a billion dead seconds I'll never have the time to rehydrate.

I wasn't thinking about all this on a recent business trip with a colleague. We were unwrapping turkey sandwiches in a Jersey train station's bar and I was thinking about whether it was inappropriate to have a Midori sour in front of her. It was one of those blessed ageless moments.

'I'm not in the office' I thought. 'I'm free.'
I could have been retired or just out of college.

I didn't order the drink but it would've helped to be lubed for the next part of the conversation. Eventually we came around to age, what we'd like to be doing after the inevitable demise of the company we work for, and what is next for both of us. She said she'd like to go back to school, work in health and help people. I encouraged her to think about it, saying hey, she's only thirty-six, it's still doable to go to class at night, now's the time. I went on to describe the immeasurable sense of empowerment I get from attending classes, how they feel like a weapon against inertia...
and, blah
blah
blah
blahhhhh....
Her eyes were on the liquor selection lining the mirrored bar. I noticed she had gone internal, wasn't making eye contact and seemed to, well, not care. It was fine, I thought, she wasn't ready to really think about next steps. We were silent for a moment.

And then she said, quietly, almost so I couldn't hear,
"I'm forty."
"What?" I asked.
"I'm forty."
"What are you talking about? You're thirty-six, we're two years apart, and we've been two years apart for the nine years I've worked for the company."
"You don't understand. I'm forty. I'm just realizing it."
"Wait, wait, wait" I said. "How can this be? How can you just be realizing you're forty?"
"Well" she said softly "I was born in 1969. I guess I stopped counting. I stopped counting at thirty-six."

I thought I detected a shiny horizon of tears forming on the edge of her lower lids. She looked shell shocked.

"You're the first person in four years to ask about my age" she said. "Do you think about your age much?"
"Every second of every moment in every hour of every day" I replied.

I tried to imagine waking up halfway through forty. Maybe it'd be better to have it land on your head like an anvil and stun you into accepting it. Maybe it was better to realize it at a Jersey train station bar, over a cello-wrapped turkey sandwich, with someone you only know professionally. She seemed as shocked that I spent all my time thinking about aging as I was that she never did. And suddenly I felt self-consciously young and foolish; idiotically worried about things I have plenty of time to sort out. What if I had somehow stopped counting and one day woke up years older, wondering how on earth I'd forgotten to mark four years of my life?

"Huh", she chuckled. "My husband's gonna love this. Guess it makes him forty four."
"What now?" I asked.
"Well, I'm wondering if I should have a birthday."

Just for that night I didn't pull at the pair of vertical ski-shaped wrinkles cutting their way into the space between my eyebrows.