Today I Turn 50

Yes, today is my 50th birthday. I was born in Madison, Wisconsin, on June 24, 1956, at 4:49 in the anti-matter, at what was then known as Madison General Hospital. I am told it was hot all that June until the day I was born, when the heat broke and it was never so unreasonably hot again the rest of the summer.

Fifty years ago. Five decades. Half a century.

Turning 50 I feel at ease, almost serene. Of course it helps that in recent years I find myself living a quiet and usually tranquil life; I'm doing work I love, living among people I love; I'm in good health; and I live on a gravel road far out into the countryside, far from the madding crowd of city life.

Turning 40, by contrast, was for me quite an ordeal. Several months into being flat broke, massively in debt, radically underemployed, and with no light at the end of the tunnel. It's a long story, let me tell you. I did that midlife crisis thing: pulled a Kerouac, ran away 2000 miles across the continent to Seattle for six weeks, and when that predictably failed, I plunged back to earth like Icarus who had flown too close to the sun. Hopeless. Months of quiet hopelessness ensued. And in the midst of that quiet hopelessness, I became a very different person than I had always been— slower, mellower, more easygoing: a lasting transformation that has stood me in good stead these past ten years.

Turning 50 feels easy by comparison. Like I say, almost serene.

Saturday is usually my most reliably busy day of the week, in some ways even more of a marathon than Sunday morning. But this week I got things done early, and so I plan to spend today quietly relaxing. May head out somewhere, may just sit around.