Matching Tracksuits

"My age still begins with a one! I'm not that old, E!" L was laughing at the Boy's suggestion that she, turning nineteen today, is, in fact, old.

"When you're nineteen," K added, "thirty seems old. When you're thirty, fifty seems old. And when you're fifty, seventy seems old." I understand the idea, but I think the perceived difference in ages is a exponential curve: Now that I'm in my fifties, for example, it's not just the addition of twenty years that seems "old." Truly "old" for me would be somewhere close to mid-eighties or even nineties.

Old in your teens means having a job and bills. In your thirties, it suggests kids in or barely out of college, and increase in fiscal responsibilities that hints, nonetheless, at relative financial freedom. In your fifties, with a kid in college and another approaching high school, I feel truly "old" is when mobility begins really declining, and that seems to me to be sometime in one's eighties. When doctors' visits are the primary reason for the ever-challenged mobility, that suggests advanced age.

Still, I understood the sentiment: an age seems old until we reach that age.

All of this seemed to receive a coincidental confirmation when, on L's urging, we looked at our year-end Spotify summary -- Spotify Wrapped. K's listening age: 80. How L and I laughed! I knew with my recent re-obsession with Ghost and several similar bands, I had to be younger, musically. But alas, it couldn't outweigh the jazz and classical music that forms the core of my classroom music. My listening age: 84. So my listening age is what I officially consider the very edge of old age, suggesting to some, I suppose, that I have an old soul.

The day as a whole was just as strangely out of sync with our standard daily routine as was this date nineteen years ago. We spent it in the hospital with the newly-born Girl and my parents. Today I took a personal day to appear in court regarding the still-unresolved accident roughly two weeks ago, but the office was not in the courthouse and would not be able to make it time, so everything got reschedule for Monday. K spent most of the morning sleeping: one of her projects was finishing up with the actual waterline tie-in, which is something that requires water to be shut off for a number of people and as such, is usually done at night. She got back home a little after four in the morning, just about an hour before her usual wakeup time.

In the afternoon, I helped the Girl bake some cookies. I broke up the candy canes as we chatted about anything, everything, and nothing of any real significance. College classes, politics, music, funny things we saw on the internet. Everything and nothing. Having those conversations with our daughter is still a relatively new development in our relationship, and, I think, a sign that she's growing out of that teenage reluctance to go beyond monosyllabic responses to many questions much of the time. I was that way, too. Most of us are, I think. and see it's a binder from