Under The Wither

Is it a function of getting older that people just annoy you all the time, or were they always annoying and as the rest of your senses dull it just becomes more acutely obvious? It’s like when you get older and you go to a bar and suddenly the music is always too loud. You would think that a person who has a hard time hearing would never think anything is too loud, but the fact remains that it is. It is probably because we have stopped listening to the music and started trying to have a real conversation just at the moment when our bodies no longer allow us to do so. I guess people are like the club. Just at the moment you want to get serious about knowing them, the noise they generate around themselves is overwhelming.

When my mother turned forty, she said, “I never thought I’d live this long” as she blew out the candles. My sister and I still being teenagers at the time, it seemed strange to think at the time that she would embark on that most important journey of parenthood with no real expectation of seeing it through to the end. But now that I am blowing out similar numbers of candles, I see what she meant. It all went by so fast but at the same time, we’ve been here a long time and we are still here, with a lot more time to go. It is like running a marathon where you ran your heart out for the first ten miles only to discover as you are gasping for air that there are another sixteen miles to go. Everyone is standing around on the sidelines cheering, but all you want to do is sit down for a minute.