I got a notification from my high school alumni/reunion board thingie this morning.
Another one of my classmates died. I didn’t know her well, but she was always kind to me, so I had a little Sad for her.
And after perusing the board1, I had a thought:
You know you’ve reached a certain age when your reunion board goes from when’s the party? to when’s the funeral?.
When I die, y’all…? Please have a party. Remember me with hangovers and a whew, that was a wild ride rather than tears and dirges and she lit up a room nonsense2. I’m tempted to change my will from having my ashes clandestinely scattered3 in an undisclosed location on Mt. Rainier to having them shot out of a freaking tee-shirt cannon, preferably somewhere weird.
But I digress.
I do that4.
I was going to mention how that’s just one of the little changes of getting older, along with things like finding new locations for grey hairs, and peeing a little when you cough and vaginal dryness, but honestly, we know it all already. We talk about all that stuff now, much moreso than a generation or two ago when women just smiled sweetly and quietly drank a lot of gin while plucking the rogue chin hairs of cronehood.
So I’ll just leave it here, pondering the philosophy of getting older and watching everyone below a certain age start to believe you’re from the freaking stone age when it was the 1980’s dammit, so no, we did not have to churn our own butter5.
Happy hump day, etc. etc. et. al.. Hope you’re having a fantastic day that’s not full of random aches and pains. :)
which I rarely look at, largely because I wasn’t all that fond of most of those bozos when I was actually in high school, and now that I’m an adult, I don’t have to give a crap about what they’re doing now. I’m just saying.
I mean, you know that’s all a lie anyway. I don’t light up a room. I’m like a little rainy shadow that skulks in and watches everything with quiet interest so I can make funny posts about you later.
Clandestinely/undisclosed…because it’s technically illegal to leave your crispy fried relations in a national park. I’m a scofflaw.
A lot.
Though, to be fair, if you can get farm-fresh cream, home churned butter is a transcendental experience. Angels will sing in your mouth. Which sounded far less gross in my head, but you know what I mean.
I'm catching up on Substack, and nodded enthusiastically as I read this. Really, age is WEIRD. In my case, I'm still concerned that when Facebook abruptly shut down my account, some long-ago classmates (and other friends?) might think I'd died. Because yes, at a certain point, that seems to be A Thing that people talk about, rather than who got a promotion at work, or who just had their own show at a super-cool art gallery.
It's like morbid stuff seeps into people's brains, even before Social Security kicks in. Or something. Very, VERY weird.
(Speaking of classmates: One of my epic high school moments was when a very weird biology teacher, who seemed fixated on me, asked me - in front of the entire class - if I was "a knob-twiddler." I'm pretty sure he meant something about changing TV channels a lot - or at least I hope he did - but that's not what my classmates assumed. Ahem. Don't even ask how often that was referenced when people signed my high school yearbook. * sigh and chuckle * )
So much to relate to in this post - and how, I ask you HOW, is it now about to be 40 years since I graduated high school? Because I swear I’m NOT OLD. Except for the days when oh my dog, I really, really am.