Obsession

My friend Gary is almost exactly one year younger than I am. OK, I'm actually 13 months older, but who is counting that precisely.

Since we are both approaching 50, he and I talk about age quite a bit. (The other friends in our little group are at least 8 years younger than us so the majority of our "real" age discussions are with each other.) Though most of the time when we talk we are laughing and making light of it, every once in a while I think we have an obsession. Here is Gary's:

As I got into my mid-40s I developed an obsession with checking celebrity ages to gauge my own. It was usually when they'd appear in a movie or on TV I'd get the itch to look them up so I could convince myself that, for example, if Pacino and De Niro were pretty damn cool in Heat, and already into their early 50s, then I still had some virile time left — a nice fat slice of it.

I'd started handing the data to my parents, too, who were in their 70s and lamenting the slide. I'd try to assuage them with "Hey, Ronald Reagan was barely into his first term at your age. Think of that!" Of course it didn't make them feel better, so terrifying was the idea of moving from the comfy sofa and its fleece throw to the studded straight-backed chairs of the White House for a 14-hour round of meetings. They couldn’t relate at all to the now-deceased Reagan who was energetic in his 70s.

I reached a point where I began to feel ridiculous about gauging age this way. Too clinical, I guess. Putting too precise a measure on things. Establishing that you are still youngish is also beginning the countdown to when you are not. And even though it was coming from a probably normal anxiety about getting older, it was turning me into the kind of simple-minded fool I'd always hated. "Ha, I'm younger than you," etc.

Of course, I don't think Gary is ridiculous.

Let's have lunch soon so I can vent about how beautiful everyone said Demi Moore was when she turned 40 though she worked out 8 hrs a day with a personal trainer and denies plastic surgery. Oh, and by the way, she is only 2 years younger than I am.

[You all didn't really think I was going to include a photo of Demi from the movie Charlie's Angels where she is running on the beach in a bikini. That would just be cruel, though it would prove my point.]