Excuse Me

            Excuse me, but how did I get to be 55?

            It’s sobering when I realize that my “new” flute is forty years old.  It’s perhaps a little more sobering when I note that I’ve been playing flute for forty-five years.

            Weren’t the 1990s just a short time ago? 

            I remember the very first time I surfed the Web—there was a single computer in the college library basement that had an Internet connection, so one slow afternoon at work I tried it out.  (The faculty was being encouraged to keep up with technology, after all.)  I typed in various search terms and spent an hour or so following whatever caught my interest—mostly German pages to see how much German I remembered.  That was back when I didn’t even have a computer in my office.

            I can take another leap backward in time to the 1970s.  Attending a prestigious liberal arts college in the Midwest, I had my moments of snobbery.  One was looking down my nose at the newfangled computer course offerings.  “Who,” I thought, “would bother with those machines?  They aren’t that important.  I mean, who would ever have occasion to use one?”  So I continued with my eclectic assortment of humanities courses, dutifully typing my research papers on my manual Olivetti typewriter.

            I seem to remember being young in the 1980s, entering marriage and motherhood with the firm conviction that I was going to get everything right, unlike all the previous generations of humankind.  Most of my friends were even younger than I and similarly enlightened, though I did have one friend who was impossibly old:  over forty, I think!

            And even Y2K is more than a decade gone.  Our church had a New Year’s Eve party, and when the lights went out at the stroke of midnight, there was a millisecond of fear . . . until we realized one of the teens had hit the switch.  Turns out I didn’t need that back-up $50 I had hidden in my house in case the banks closed.

            Now, with the benefit of fifty-five and a half years of life experience behind me, I have gained a certain amount of wisdom.  I no longer believe in life without computers.  I’ve forgotten more German than I remember.  I have come to grips with the fact that someday my children will be over forty.   And once in awhile, sometimes, on a good day, I even get a thing or two right.  But I’m still surprised to see this older version of myself staring back from the mirror.