Well, it’s official, I’m old. It’s been confirmed, there’s no avoiding, denying, or thing to be done about it.
I suppose each person arrives at this realization in their own unique way. For some it might be the issuance of an AARP card. That isn’t what did it for me. I was offered an AARP card before I was even eligible, so the whole enterprise loses legitimacy at that point. I mean, they don’t even know who is old, how can they know what constitutes old – or when it occurs, for that matter.
And it’s not the number corresponding to my age in years. If you say it correctly, it doesn’t sound old. Just make sure the first thing out of your mouth is forty, as in forty-fourteen. Try it. Forty-thirty. Sounds like a quarterback audible. Forty-forty. Sounds like a rifle caliber.
My body? Well, it’s not going to win any prizes. And it’s definitely past the warranty, but it remains remarkably trouble-free.
My mind? They say of actors, “They’re never young, and they never grow old.” I forget what that’s supposed to mean, but it’s not my mind that makes me say, “I’m old.” It’s the role, and that’s not a misspelling.
You’re fine? As in, I have plenty of fine lines on my face? As in, I’m finally character-actor material?
So, that would be the depressing version of this latest chapter of my acting...careen – I still find it difficult to call it a career. The uplifting, soul-filling account of this chapter is that I am in a Tony Award winning, Pulitzer Prize Finalist of a play, with a supremely talented cast around me. Getting old might not be such a bad thing after all.
| Copyright © 2020 by James Knudsen |
James, thanks for never failing to delight me with one verbal invention or another, starting here with your “ there’s no avoiding, denying, or thing to be done about it,” and proposing that I could be forty-thirty-seven rather than seventy-seven. I like it!
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