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round the decades, every year
summer leaves and my birthday's here
and all my friends stand up and cheer
and say man, you're old
I found birthdays much, much more traumatic as a youngster than I do in my twenties. For me, then, it felt like age was identity, and the changes from seven to eight to nine to ten shook me like bad haircuts or black eyes, like the things that make your face not your own when you meet it in the mirror. Tweleve to thirteen was especially bad; I had no interest, none at all, in becoming a teenager, and I cried for days beforehand. Generally speaking, I've always had my hands full at whatever level I was at; it wasn't until graduate school that I was ever really impatient to complete the life stage I was in.
So it's been pleasant, in the years since turning twenty-one, not to have dread warring with the acquisitive anticipation as my birthday approaches. Twenty-seven, twenty-eight, the change is not as traumatic as the change twenty years ago.
summer leaves and my birthday's here
and all my friends stand up and cheer
and say man, you're old
I found birthdays much, much more traumatic as a youngster than I do in my twenties. For me, then, it felt like age was identity, and the changes from seven to eight to nine to ten shook me like bad haircuts or black eyes, like the things that make your face not your own when you meet it in the mirror. Tweleve to thirteen was especially bad; I had no interest, none at all, in becoming a teenager, and I cried for days beforehand. Generally speaking, I've always had my hands full at whatever level I was at; it wasn't until graduate school that I was ever really impatient to complete the life stage I was in.
So it's been pleasant, in the years since turning twenty-one, not to have dread warring with the acquisitive anticipation as my birthday approaches. Twenty-seven, twenty-eight, the change is not as traumatic as the change twenty years ago.
