Mt. Pleasant Classical Academy

There it is, out in the open, I turned the BIG FIVE-ZERO today.
I did a Google search on turning fifty. One site suggested that I should buy a box of chocolates with fifty candies and eat one a day for fifty days? I know me well enough to know I’d eat all fifty in fifty minutes, or fifty seconds Chocolates and me are best friends. I’d love having a big party, however, we have been gone so often this past summer or DH was off on a business trip that the party never was planned. Oh well, that is the way life is sometimes. And then there are those signs; you’ve seen them:

Fifty is Nifty—-or so they say—-a friend sent me that one on a card. I sure didn’t feel so nifty after hiking Mt Marcy. The sore muscles seem to come oh so easily after any strenuous workout, and stay and stay and stay. What is so nifty about turning fifty?

The one I saw in the campground last week was much more to my liking:

Growing Old is inevitable, growing up is optional.

Now that saying suits me much more. I really like the idea of not growing up, however it is only from thinking about what I have witnessed over the past years does it hit me how many years there have been. So even though I so often feel that I am still in my thirties, the birth date on my driver’s license confirms what my experiences tell me. I’ve seen many changes during my years, enough for fifty years.

I remember homes without air conditioning, or TV’s let alone color TV’s. During the Cold War years I remember how we practiced sitting in a tuck position in the school’s hallway in case of a nuclear attack. Then there was that day in 2^nd grade when the announcement came over the school’s loudspeaker system that JFK had been assassinated. I remember sitting with my classmates in the school’s assemble hall to watch the first rocket launch to take a man around the Earth, and sitting there again as he was fished out of the ocean. I remember the Beatles first appearance, peace marches, Woodstock, staying up late to watch the first man walk on the moon, the Viet Nam War, Watergate, the impeachment of Nixon, and the advent of the kitchen microwave. I remember seeing my first pocket calculator in ’74 and then purchasing my first calculator for $150. Oh the joy of not having to use a slide rule in my engineering classes. I was one of the first engineers to use a PC in the huge R&D Engineering firm I worked for in the early ‘80’s and then saw it replace the electric typewriters the secretaries were so fond of. The telephone went from being a rotary box to little cell phones. And the birth of the Internet; my how far that has come.

Fifty years have passed, but it still seems so hard to believe. I’ve seen a lot of changes but somehow it feels like I’m only in my thirties. It helps that I do look much younger than my age, and while this was aggrivating when I was younger it is quite nice now. Once while cruising through a wine store the clerk demanded that I leave the store since I looked underage. She exclaimed as she looked at my driver’s license, “OMG, you’re older than me!” Yes, I was in my late twenties and others thought I was under 21. Those youthful looks are nice now since others often believe me to be 10 or 15 years younger. So, I’m not too interested in growing up and acting over fifty. Naw, for now I’ll still keep acting young. But a new page is turning for me,…mid-life crisis—that’s not for me, Fifty, hmmm, I think I’ll go out for a 50 minute walk.