47, the First Day

So far so good.

In the long run, none of our fears about turning middle aged have been realized. We don't really feel tired all the time. We're not bored. We're not fat, in fact till the outbreak came we were in great shape. In further fact, we weigh less than we did 20 years ago. Pro tip, gentlemen: never quit smoking and get married in the same year. We have most of our hair and it's just starting to grey at the temples. Women dig that. We're aging well and we think we have a certain distinguished look about us.

Honestly when you have a home, a pretty wife and three daughters who are healthy and happy, when you've taken the steps you need to take to be the same and you have a career that includes a blog, a dozen novels and a column, it's hard to complain.

As our family is in Indiana, yesterday  we went up to our dad's for a few hours, (an hour and a half drive) On the way back we stopped by Ferncliff Cemetery and paid our respects at the increasingly large family plot. Later we celebrated with a glass of Shackleton Whisky and an Arturo Fuente. 

Our father lives in the home in which we grew up, and it was weird being there 40 years to the day of our first birthday there. We remember it well. After our friends left we played in the corner on the porch with one of our presents, click here. It was a scorcher and we can still feel the heat. We always remembered highlights from a baseball game, though we didn't realize it was played on our birthday till we looked it up a few years ago, click here.

Slowly our father is cleaning out the joint. It's been 25 years since we could call it home, but there's still a few odds and ends of ours there. The closet shelf in our old room still has some stuff we brought home from our US Senate internship. It's like a 1995 time capsule. That August we left for our new apartment in Northern Virginia we'd gotten with a friend we made over the summer. We started our cursed time at a non-Jesuit school in Washington DC. Heh, just six years later we moved to New Jersey, 20th anniversary next year!