"Gypsy Love Song"

Just a one page tune, and the winner so far in the oldest song category, published in 1898. Maybe I'm just not a Victor Herbert fan, but there are more of his yet to come. The idea of gypsies is always good for me, there's something dark, romantic, wild, and mysterious about gypsies.

I've been thinking about my own recent adventures, or what passes for adventures. When I was in my twenties I did ok, adventure-wise: getting stoned and going for a bike ride or doing interpretive art, setting out to ride my bike from Penn State to DC and ending up hitching rides (all of that not stoned), sleeping with a man old enough to be my father just so I could say I did (not that he wasn't a beautiful man besides), exploring cities I didn't know all by myself, going to a Rainbow gathering in Minnesota with twenty dollars in my pocket, moving to a new city after being held up at gunpoint while working in DC. They all seem relatively tame now, and they seemed pretty tame then, too, but there was some sense of adventure about them. All of this in comparison to the here and now, when my biggest adventure is going out to run a 5K all by myself, following Mapquest directions to some borough with a stoplight out in the middle of nowhere. Wooo eeee. Hold me back, folks, I'm on a crazy merry go round of wacky fun.

While I'd like to believe that this mildness of extreme is due to being a mom, and I do know that this is partially true, it's also that I am no longer young. I have become responsible. For some reason I was really feeling my age the other day, musing aloud to one of my clients about plans for my fortieth birthday, coming up next year, and he said, "Wow! You're turning forty? That makes me feel old!" Yes, this is all about you, I thought. Turning forty in and of itself doesn't make me feel old. Turning thirty-five felt old only after my friend, Maria, pointed out that this would put me in a new age bracket for surveys, where I am now lumped in with the forty-four year olds. (How fair is that?) But I was thinking favorably about turning forty, and age brackets, this time around, since if I am still running when I turn forty (likely), I'll be able to whoop the pants off those forty-nine year olds in my age bracket (theoretically).

So the wacky adventure now really is about getting older. Feeling in my prime, admittedly, in better shape physically than I've ever been in most ways, and not expecting to break down into dust at any point soon, but this aging thing is a-happening. I will no longer be in my thirties next year. I want to not be limited by defining things in that light, but I'm having trouble keeping this idea entirely out of my head.

For solace, I go back to this summer, at my brother's wedding reception, where my aunt asked me when I was going to start aging; or to a music festival a couple of years ago when an old acquaintence said that I looked exactly the same. I certainly don't feel much different, and the differences I do feel are for the better. Meanwhile, in that 5K race last weekend, I placed first in my age group (while still in my thirties! unexpected!), and got a mug to show for it. Maybe when dementia sets in, whenever that happens, I'll forget that there were only two of us. The other woman said that she was trying to catch me the whole way.