Lately I’ve begun to realize that I’m a lot older than I thought.   I think the fact that we never had children kept me, in an odd way, young.  I didn’t have a measuring stick of time going by, didn’t watch a child head off to kindergarten, graduate from high school, have kids of their own.  Somewhere in the back of my mind I’m still just out of school.  Ok.  Not just out of high school, but certainly just out of college.  Undergrad college, when the future was bright and all things were possible.  Forgotten is the fact that I graduated in the late 70’s when we were in a recession and there were no jobs.  Or that when I got out of grad school the first time with my MBA it was the late 80’s when there were no jobs.  And here I am again, a year out of grad school, working part time in a public library when everything is crazy, there are no jobs, funding is being cut and savings are being drained.  But I digress.

I’ve always thought that the future was endless, that all possibilities were open, that there was time to try everything I’ve ever been interested in.  Whenever something came along that sounded fun I’d add it to the list of things to do “some day.”  It’s only been recently that I’ve begun to realize that there are not infinite “some days” out there, and that possibly, just possibly I’m not going to get around to doing all the things on my wish list.  Oddly enough this realization is happening in part because I’m working at a library.

At the library I get to work with lots of people, all ages, and while I like working with such a wide variety of people, my favorite group has always been senior citizens.  Especially senior citizen readers.  What’s becoming clear to me is that some of these seniors are not much older than I am!  This is a shock and not one I’m adjusting to gracefully!  As I’m registering new patrons for library cards and entering their data into the system I’m beginning to notice birth dates.  And the most difficult thing for me to reconcile is that many of these adults are people that could have been my children!  They were born as I was graduating from college the first time.  And they have children of their own who could be my grandchildren!

I think in my prior life, when I didn’t have access to actual birth dates I went along thinking that everyone was pretty much my age, whatever age that was.   I had no proof that life was moving ahead, time was slipping away.  Now I do, and I’m going to have to figure out how to deal with it.  There are lots of things I still want to do and  I always figured I’d get to it all.  Now I think I may have to condense a few things or leave them off the list entirely.  Might never learn to fly that plane.  Might never live in a downtown loft,  out in a tiny cabin in the middle of my own 50 acres, or on the shores of a Great Lake.  Might not write that great American novel.  Might not bike from coast to coast, or hike to the bottom of the Grand Canyon. Might be that all the marathons I’ll run have already been run.  Maybe I won’t have time to learn another language, get that PhD, or start a nonprofit.  Maybe I won’t make a difference in one student’s life, put someone through college or get on-board recorders mandated on all big trucks.  Maybe not in this lifetime.

Then again.  Just might.