I’m turning 50 years old this week, whether the grocery store clerk believes it or not
I’m not one of those people who typically makes a big deal about their birthday.
I don’t publicly list my birthday on Facebook. I haven’t had any sort of blowout celebration of my birthday since I turned 21 (and to be honest that night felt more like a punishment than a celebration). I’m the last person you’ll ever hear exclaim anything resembling “It’s my birthday month!”
But I’m turning 50 on Saturday, and since 50 is pretty iconic as milestone birthdays go, I’m making an exception this year.
That doesn’t mean I’m going to throw a big party or try for a month-long attention grab. It just means I’m going to share with you a list of 50 things I’m wishing for and hoping this week, for my 50th birthday, as I reflect on living a half-century of life. Here it is:
1. I wish good health and happiness to the supermarket employee who took one look at my I.D. when I was buying beer at the self-checkout area at Food Lion recently — and who then immediately started running around the front of the store and grabbing various people’s arms and pointing at me, crying, “There’s no WAY that man is going to be 50 years old this month!”
2. I hope she wasn’t just making fun of me.
3. I hope she can appreciate that if I didn’t shave my head, she probably wouldn’t have the same kind of reaction to seeing my birth date on my driver’s license, since I imagine my shiny bald patch would be a giveaway.
4. I hope my wife appreciates how much money I’ve saved over the past decade by not needing to pay someone to cut my hair.
5. Quite frankly, I wish there was an easy, cheap, at least relatively natural way to get hair to start regrowing on the top back part of my head. I miss my mini-faux hawk. Faux-hawks are still cool, right?
6. That was a joke. This is not: I wish cargo shorts would come back into style. They’re comfortable! I can’t speak for women, but what’s comfortable about a three-inch inseam on a pair of men’s shorts??
7. But returning real quick to the topic of hair... while I wouldn’t mind it being back on my head, I wish it would stop growing out of my ears.
8. And I wish my ears would stop ringing.
9. In fact, I wish I’d gotten these custom-fitted decibel-lowering ear plugs and worn them to concerts decades ago — the only thing worse than tinnitus is the sound of screaming toddlers operating leaf blowers.
10. I definitely wish I would have had ear plugs, and worn them, to the three Taylor Swift concerts I’ve been to.
11. This is also as good an excuse as any, by the way, to say I wish that when Taylor Swift’s record label had reached out to me in 2007 when Taylor was still a teenager and asked me if I wanted to interview Taylor, I hadn’t thought to myself, Eh, never heard of her, and then said no.
12. I hope one day that I’ll still get to interview Taylor, even if I have to wait till I’m 60.
13. I hope you don’t think a 50-year-old man being a big Taylor Swift fan is as cringe-y as my wife does.
14. I wish I could say with a straight face that Taylor Swift is my only guilty pleasure, but have you seen how fast I can go through a big bag of smuggled-in Jelly Bellys? At the movies I can get through a two-pound bag before the previews are even over.
15. I hope you aren’t outraged by the fact that I smuggle Jelly Bellys into movie theaters.
16. After all, I hope you recognize that there are far worse ways to ruin the movie-going experience for someone else.
17. I mean, I wish that in this day and age we weren’t still having to listen to people talk during the movies; and weren’t still having to see texting during the movies; and weren’t still having to suffer through people disobeying any of the various other instructions mentioned in the little pre-movie promo that explains what NOT to do during a movie.
18. And I hope you know that when I say “people” what I mostly mean is “teenagers.”
19. (Oh God, I hope I’m not turning into my father...)
20. In fact, I often wish teenagers weren’t allowed out in public at all. (Ugh, I am turning into my father!)
21. Incidentally, I also wish rental scooters weren’t allowed out in public.
22. But seeing as both teenagers and scooters are allowed out in public, I must say: I wish teenagers weren’t allowed to rent scooters.
23. Oh, and while I’m at it, I’ll go ahead and wish that teenagers weren’t allowed to have cell phones either.
24. By the way, I don’t know how teenagers feel about this, but I personally wish they’d stop making the top-of-the-line iPhones so huge. When I bring my phone with me when I go out for a run, I feel like I’m running down the street holding a box of cereal.
25. Speaking of running, I wish I’d become a serious runner when I was in my 20s, or even while I was growing up, instead of waiting till I was 35 to get my butt off the couch.
26. I wish I was still getting faster and not starting to get slower.
27. I hope I’m still running when I’m 65.
28. I mean, to some extent, I hope I’m still standing when I’m 65.
29. Assuming I am, I hope standing for more than 20 straight minutes doesn’t hurt my back worse than standing for more than 20 straight minutes hurts my back now.
30. Sigh. I wish I would just go to the doctor and get my back looked at already.
31. Or better yet, I wish someone would invent a pill that magically makes it so my back doesn’t hurt when I stand for more than 20 straight minutes.
32. Although I also hope I can go at least another decade before I have to be put on any maintenance medications.
33. I actually wish “maintenance medications” wasn’t even something in my vocabulary yet.
34. Same with the word “readers.”
35. Or “nocturia.”
36. If you wish, you can Google No. 35. Or I can just explain it this way: I wish that I when I woke up in the middle of the night, I could just roll over and fall back asleep instead of having the sensation of a full bladder and needing to get out of bed every time to go to the bathroom (often two, but — in pretty rare but humiliating instances — three times a night).
37. Just generally speaking, I wish I could still sleep through the night, period.
38. And I wish I didn’t get so drowsy every afternoon that I need to lay down and take a 15-minute nap. What am I, 4?
39. I’m just kidding. Naps freakin’ rule. I hope you know the exquisite rejuvenating feeling that an afternoon power nap can provide.
40. I’ve been taking them at least a couple times a week since I was in my 30s. I wish I’d started power-napping in my 20s.
41. One more thing I wish I’d started doing in my 20s — in addition to running and wearing ear plugs to concerts and napping in the afternoon — is sleeping with a nightguard. Well, that and saving more aggressively for retirement.
42. My retirement accounts are apparently doing pretty well, but I increasingly find myself hoping they will be enough.
43. Then again, sometimes I find myself wishing I’d tried to amass less retirement savings by this point — and had more to spend on the present — just in case I don’t make it to retirement.
44. I hope, of course, that I do.
45. I hope I’ve got 50 more years. Well, of life, not of working.
46. It’s hard to imagine it being possible, because these first 50 have been better than I probably deserve, but I hope the best is yet to come.
47. I hope my wife and I continue to love and learn and grow, and that we maintain not just the means but also the mental and physical capacity to travel to faraway places for decades to come. (Also that she comes to appreciate the joys of Taylor Swift as much as I do.)
48. I hope our daughter finds just as much happiness and even more success than her mom and I have.
49. I just wish life wasn’t so short.
50. But if there’s any sort of harbinger of a long and healthy one, I hope that maybe — just maybe — it’s a grocery store clerk making a giant production out of refusing to believe the birth date on your driver’s license is accurate.
