I’m Getting Old

I just watched a snippet of ESPN. It’s not my favorite thing to watch, but, hey, sometimes you watch the things your spouse watches because true love is embodied by the genuine surrender of the remote control.

They were interviewing Kobe Bryant. Since I don’t follow professional sports that often, I haven’t seen dear little Kobe for quite a while. When I saw him tonight my overwhelming thought was, “My goodness, that guy is looking old!”

It’s all fine and dandy to recognize someone you haven’t seen in years – maybe an old high school acquaintance or something like that — has bloated up to three times their teenage size thanks to a reliance on potato chips and carmel macchiatos. That’s a fact of life and I’ve discovered once you figure out who they are and look hard three times all the sudden the person you knew melts into the person they are and everyone’s fine in the end.

But when I recognized Kobe Bryant is no longer a fresh-faced youth I also had to acknowledge I’m older than he is. Which means there’s a better than even chance people are looking at me and thinking: “Oh, my! What happened to her?! Are those gray hairs? And the wrinkles… she should do something about those lines!”

It is a sad day.

I don’t want to chase youth, however. I have earned my gray hairs and laugh lines, even the nasty little three pronged-trident lines in between my eyebrows that make me a good candidate for Botox according to the poster at the dermatologist’s office.

The big concern for me is that, in my head, I’m still about 25. And Kobe Bryant will always be 21. Then I see him, my bubble bursts, and realize he’s actually 64 and I’m ready to sign up for a Depends-wearers support group.

How old are you in your head? Why do you think you’ve “stuck” on that age?