Twenty-four

It's a curious age, twenty-four: still young enough to snicker when you get carded, not really old enough to be taken seriously by smug boomer types. And it's an age where things tend to happen, even if it's only waiting for another couple of years to go by so your car-insurance premiums will drop to a bearable level. I even got married at twenty-four, though I would seriously question the sanity of anyone seeing me as a role model.

And now my daughter is twenty-four. She's not getting married or anything like that, but she definitely buys into the idea that this is an age where things tend to happen: she's getting ready to move to a larger apartment, and she retains a back-burner plan to buy a house when she gets a few more dollars together. (On this latter item, she is way ahead of her old man, whose financial planning is dubious at best.)

The mathematics of all this started to sink in a few years ago. When she was two, I was twenty-seven, a ratio of 13.5. When she was ten, I was thirty-five, dropping the ratio to 3.5. Next year she'll be twenty-five and I'll be fifty, bringing it down to 2. "At what point do you start treating your children like adults?" asks every parent. I think the process becomes automatic, once you get to the point where you realize that you're not all that much older than they are anymore, a point that was underscored when last I visited my father (current ratio approximately 1.5) and one bald fact — "This man has a son pushing fifty, fercrissake" — stared me in the face.

Oh, well. Enough of my pointless noodling.

Happy birthday, Becky.

Posted at 7:28 AM to Next Generation