I was on the phone with my friend Bobby a couple days ago and we seem to never run out of things to say. The conversation went on for about two hours, I think, through almost dead phone batteries and runs to the restroom.
It’s always this way. Even though we were hardly best friends when we met some 30 years ago, over time we have developed such a tight bond that I even the passage of time and 3,000 miles can’t keep us apart.
Now, in the interest of telling this story fully, I have to mention that Bobby is a wee bit older than I. About 33 years, I think. We don’t really talk about age much, so I’m not really sure how old he really is, and I’m not sure he knows how old I am currently. We just like to think of ourselves as being ageless.
I actually met Bobby when he was about may age – which if I look at my driver’s license, is 53 right now.
If I were to look in the mirror, I still see the same guy in all the pirate photos that have been appearing on my Memoirs of a Buccaneer page lately. Somewhere inside of me is still that guy.
And that led us to a funny conversation, one that still makes me smile every time I think about it.
Since we both seem to be stuck in the same vacuum of time and space where everything around us has changed but we still feel the same, we tried to figure out why this is so.
Is it because we choose to be delusional about the fact that we are indeed aging or is something else at play?
We decided the latter. I like to think of my body as a car. It transports my soul around to where it needs to go. And like my Saturn SUV, the Black Widow, out in the parking lot, the body is getting a little rusty and is in need of some body work.
But the soul is still wearing racing goggles and a silk scarf. It’s inside the body thinking about not only running more races, but winning them. It likes to kid itself that it still has the testosterone of a 24 year old, and that time has only increased its level of experience, not increased the risk of severe injury or severe embarrassment.
This is what always gets me into trouble. My youthful soul is still tooling around in a 53 year old jalopy that in many respects may have seen its better days. It doesn’t have as much get up and go as it used to, certainly an all night bender will leave me lying in bed the next day, a pain in my head, an ache in my body and a desire to die at the earliest possible convenience.
But I don’t. Instead that spirit inside me convinces me that this was just an aberration. That I’ve still got it. Then it begins to goad me and chide me, calling me a woose and a nancy girl.
Well, I’m not. So I just decide to haul that pile of junk off the sofa and shift it back into gear, pains, aches and death wishes aside. I’m not about to let some punk tell me my better days are behind me, even if I hear a loud creak or two now and then from under the hood.
Now I’ve mentioned this whole soul being driven around by the clunker I call my body before. I know I could never get a good trade in on it, so I’m stuck with it.
And this led me to an important realization. Even though my body may almost be a classic (not antique yet), my innards still think I’m a kid. I have Peter Pan Syndrome. Always have. I continue to write checks my body possibly can’t cash. And if it tries, chances are about even that they will bounce.
Being a good Northwest boy, I ended up putting it into terms that Bobby and I could both appreciate. And this leads me to the headline today.
The Pacific Northwest is blessed with thousands upon thousands of acres of pristine forests, some that probably no hiker has even been through, let alone a Weyerhaeuser employee.
In fact, I always figured it would be easy to kill someone if you had a pilot’s license. Once you whack them, simply dump them out of the plane into some of these secluded regions in the state. Who would ever find the guy? And if they did, who would have ever thought he was dumped from an airplane?
But, I digress (and if someone does find a body in the woods, I didn’t do it – it’s just a typical writer thing, thinking up scenarios. No really!)
Anyway, if you cut any tree down, you can easily find out how old it is, just by counting the rings.
I’m like that tree. Somewhere inside of me is that 24 year old in the photos. If you cut me open, I’ll lay even odds there’s a lot of rings to count. But somewhere near the core, there’s that 24 year old guy still in there. He’s just been covered up by some old growth layers over the years.
Out on the Treasure Coast, wondering if that ring in the bathtub belonged to me,
– Robb