It's my birthday today. I'm 48.

You know, I used to look at my mom and dad and admire how smart they were. I knew my dad had sort of a hardscrabble childhood and was handicapped by the lack of a high-school education, and my mom had an adolescence tempered by having to take care of her mom, so it was no surprise to me that by the time they were the age I was now, they seemed wise and settled, outside and in.

I have a horde of adult responsibilities which I try to perform with sober dispatch (some of them get more dispatched than others), but I don't feel any different than I did when I was fourteen. Was that because I was just a particularly serious fourteen year old (I mean, I always thought the other kids who were rebelling against their parents were stupid), or is this just the way it is--you really never change inside, you just learn how to act better? I recall in school a lot of the other students never "getting" "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," but I always knew just what he meant when he talked about putting on a face to meet all the other faces.

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. . . . . noted and logged by Linda at 9:40:00 AM

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